None of This Is Real
by Miranda Mellis
Sidebrow, April, 2012
115 pages / $18  Buy from Sidebrow or SPD

O, the subject of the title story of Miranda Mellis’s collection of short and long fiction, None of This Is Real, seeks solace (he has headaches—better to say “pain management,” then? we’ll see) in something called “Path to a Position™,” purveyed by its shadowy practitioner, Tiara Scuro: “She outlined for O the steps by which he would, with her, find his position. . . The old school believed the antidote for despair was courage, she said, but the real anti to the dote is a comforting distortion; this is what I call somatic realism.” “Somatic” realism? Is there another kind? Or do we deal in phenomenology?

“For years I had been removing the ground from under my clients,” she tells him,

READ MORE >

White Horse
Multi-authored chapbook (Including work by writers: Harold Abramowitz, Saehee Cho, John Cleary, Traci O Connor, Jennifer Denrow, Andrew Farkas, Sandy Florian, Paul Gacioch, Evelyn Hampton, Paul Hardacre, HL Hazuka, Kristen Jorgenson, Carrie-Sinclair Katz, Bob Marcacci, rob mclennan, Shane Michalik, Megan Milks, Cathi Murphy, Eireene Nealand, Kristen Orser, Kristin Prevallet, Zach Savich, Michael Sikkema, Jason Snyder, & James Wagner)
Sidebrow, March 2012
78 pages / $12  Buy from Sidebrow

Being a combinatory effort from a number of authors, it should strike one as no surprise that White Horse seems to be a dialogic narrative. The title remaining somewhat obtuse, save for a specific reference near the end (and tho how can we assume a meaning over all), haunts the work as a whole. In consideration of a multi-authored novel there are two routes one can take—the first being to consider the book as a book, authorless, the second being to consider the book a work of collaboration.

While I had a hope that the book would read authorless, it’s unfortunate that this is not the case. The authors are given attribution at the end of the book, and there are striking divides within the stylistic approaches each few pages take. One can feel the authors who repeat. This posits the book ultimately within the realm of collaboration, and ultimately more of a multi-person dialog than anything else. A novel experiment, it ends up seeming more of an exercise in curation rather than a coherent whole.

READ MORE >