Fiction Review: Hoaxes and Other Stories

Hoaxes and Other Stories by Brian Dinuzzo. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 161 pages. $17.95, paperback.

​Right away, this book pulled me in. The titular Hoax, the leading story of the collection by Dinuzzo, is about a budding actor who keeps dying, found the victim of a number of terrible accidents, though each one reported to the news is fake—a hoax. The rest of the stories in the collection do a similarly excellent job of grabbing me immediately, drawing me into the folds with fascinating scenarios and interesting characters. If you’re like me—a chronic lover of weird stories—this collection is for you. Dinuzzo expertly crafts these strange situations and makes each one a treat to read.

​These strange stories are, of course, held up on the backs of Dinuzzo’s wonderful characters. Grandpa Charlie of The Undeniable Proof of the Bigfoot comes to mind as one expertly rendered example: an explosive storyteller and grizzled hunter of the cryptid of legend, unwilling to let go of his first encounter with his mark, obsessed with unearthing the secret magics of his unexplained world, even as it cuts him off from his community. This wonderful pairing of situation and character are what make Hoaxes and Other Stories such a wonderful read for the individual who seeks strangeness with a heartwarming humanity at its center.

—Sydney Anderson, MAR

Book Review: I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom

I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, edited by Shelly Oria. San Francisco, California: McSweeney’s, 2022. 480 pages. $21.99, paperback.

In the months since SCOTUS’s overturning of Roe v. Wade it’s been incredibly difficult to feel like the voices of women and gender minorities are being listened to. While it’s easy to feel completely powerless, I’ve managed to take comfort in the ways I’ve seen individuals, communities, and creators work to take care of and empower those most affected. I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom, edited by Shelley Oria, has been one of those sources of power and comfort. This book does exactly what needs to be done right now; it gives marginalized people a place to talk about their decisions, bodies, and lives as if they are important (because they are). The anthology consists of the work of 28 creators and includes works of fiction, poetry, photography, creative nonfiction, plays, and even a comic. The collection was done in collaboration with and works to financially support the The Brigid Alliance, a long-standing organization that helps people access abortion care and travel funds in underserved areas.

One of the many great strengths of this book is that it refuses to limit the narrative of reproductive justice to one kind of story. So often conversations around this topic work to solely center able-bodied cis straight white women who need an abortion because of specific circumstances. Not only is this narrative reductive, it’s offensive and extremely harmful to those who are most vulnerable. This anthology gives the microphone to BIPOC, queer, and disabled artists who work to show an honest and complicated range of experiences. I’m grateful to Mcsweeney’s for giving this book a platform and grateful to all of these creators for their stories in such a violent time. There is something important to be gained from each and every one of the pieces in this anthology. I hope you all go get this book and/or request it at your local library.

—Gen Greer, MAR

Chapbook Review: All Small Planes

All Small Planes by Eric Roy. Whitman, Massachusetts: Lily Poetry Review, 2021. 19 pages. $12.00, paperback. 

Eric Roy begins All Small Planes with a statistic: 72,000 opioid deaths in America in 2017, which comes to 197 daily deaths, an death toll equivalent to a 737 jet fatally crashing every single day. But Roy’s collection doesn’t toss around rates as abstract signifiers of widespread tragedy; All Small Planes invites the opioid crisis into your living room, following the narrator/speaker’s brother—nicknamed Small Plane after a childhood shoplifting incident—as he bums cigarettes to his daughter at an airshow, exemplifies the Irish goodbye before a party’s end, and crashes on the speaker’s couch. After all, “you get the feeling at any moment / he could fall apart mid-flight. So, if not your couch / then crash where? A suburban lawn? Golf Course? / Mother’s aging mall? The Pentagon’s garage?” 

Unfolding in just fifteen poems at one page apiece, All Small Planes tells a full story of nostalgia and grief while leaving much unsaid. Roy lets this brevity and quiet speak for itself, much like Small Plane and his daughter “finally having a decent conversation / but in the form of quickly fading black redacted clouds” as they smoke together in silence while the airshow rushes overhead. Though conversational at first glance, Roy fills these poems with moments of sonic delight, gorgeous observation, and striking figurations of landscape: “upside-down, / blue sky below no lake or ocean, the straight arm of horizon / beckoning his descent as he spirals for control.”

Landing, crashing, taking off or being jumped from, Small Plane brings color and life to the statistic which begins the book. Whether or not we understand, beyond the numbers, just how widespread the opioid epidemic is, Roy’s work reminds us what these losses look like on a human level, at the scale of daily life. Every day, this crisis touches more and more lives; All Small Planes is a collection both for those whose homes have only ever been brushed by graphs and data on a tv screen, as well as for those whose friends and family—their stories, dreams, obsessions, and nicknames—have been lost in the numbers. 

-Samuel Burt, MAR

Poetry Review: Traveling With the Ghosts

Traveling With the Ghosts by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Asheville, North Carolina: Orison Books, 2021. 107 pages. $16.00, paperback.

invocation 

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

those eyes you love

the violet eyes

of Spring     the girl

descending 

the hill     or Spring

itself in violent

wind—

let me clean the air

with a vowel

or two & start 

the healing     can you be 

more human 

Death

as we are flying now on our

broken

    wings 

Traveling With the Ghosts, Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s latest collection of poetry, demonstrates how immense language can become when distilled. Between these pages, the sounds of leaves and shade spell out names, poems take as tangible a shape as mountains, and rivers become what cleans “the void / between your soul & your / tongue.” Yet despite the physical power of words to call down old gods and scrub the air clean, Radulescu’s work in this collection occupies the tenuous spaces that wisdom and keen observation uncover in the world. In poems as musical as they are meditative, images grow inside the speaker, language weighs upon the body, and exterior surroundings impose themselves, like “hills darkening on your tongue.” There is psychological and spiritual power in the reciprocal exchanges between the body and what it bears witness to, and this is Radulescu’s currency: “I don’t have wings / but I can fly with all the leaves / the birds the clouds / I speak your language god / & you speak mine.” 

These are vivid, singular poems that refuse easy truths and settle best in hands open to the challenges that visit when they attempt to hold onto nothing, or everything. “stay by your night stay by your / emptiness // it will call you,” Radulescu affirms: “this is how shadow by shadow / & void by void I put together / a new sentence.” Just as the speaker remains open to the world and to the voids we pull language from, readers must open themselves to these poems. And as vivid images and profound realizations spill into one another throughout Radulescu’s sparsely punctuated, heavily lineated work, any demands that the reader entered with for absolute, binary certainty on matters of presence/void or language/silence will begin to slip away. This is the gift of Radulescu’s Traveling With the Ghosts: providing a space outside of the definite, or the confines of the sure, in which readers may discover and rediscover the divine scope of language.

-Samuel Burt, MAR

dusk dusk

by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu

find

a rhyme ask

our gods to light

a candle

the page lies

blank

too far the stars

too deep the grave 

speak     your

life

a word can burn

forever