The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley
Femme Friday People! Next week I’ll highlight some old school righteous woman, but today, I review The Suburban Swindle by the amazing Jackie Corley:
“It’s impossible to be anything but a memory” Juliana Hatfield
Jackie Corley, in her short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, (So New Publishing), creates a loved and loathed world, a deeply felt suburban New Jersey, peopled by flawed, suffering characters and often narrated by an “I” that feels much older than her twentysomething years. Like Justin Taylor in his excellent book of poems, More Perfect Depictions of Noise (soon to be reviewed by my husband) Corley manages to use her youth as a writer to her great advantage. She is so close to her material that a rawness of emotion, a bewilderment with the edges of life, comes alive on the page.
The opening lines say it all and Corley never lets up after them:
What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead Garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We’re what happens when you’re bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude’s basement trying to get the guy’s white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes.