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Joseph Young lives in
Baltimore, where he
co-runs the art blog Baltimore
Interview and keeps the microfiction blog very small dogs.
His work has been featured in SmokeLong
Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Hobart, Exquisite Corpse, Pindeldyboz,
Word Riot, Lit Pot, Blue Moon Review, Haypenny, Rock Heals, Eleven
Bulls, JMWW, elimae, Frigg and others. He is fond of
collaboration and has created art exhibitions with visual artists such
as Christine Sajecki and Magnolia Laurie.
Read
an interview
with Joseph Young
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"The
filmmaker forgets his camera. He goes to the river instead, ice sliding
by in blue sheets. On one is a man cooking over a pale fire. Hey, says
the man, sliding by. By the time this melts, I'll be in warmer parts.
The filmmaker sells his camera. He makes out for the desert, writing
poems like sun under static."
Reviewed by David Woodruff
Easter Rabbit,
published by Publishing Genius, is made up of three sections and a
total of 86 micro fictions, ranging from 17 words to 200, with most
averaging around fifty. The three sections are titled: Easter Rabbit, Deep Falls, and God Not Otherwise. The first two
sections offer a contrast in terms of a more urban setting in Easter Rabbit and a more rural one
in Deep Falls.
Characters are referred by the pronouns "he" or "she". One might wonder
whether certain characters are repeated from story to story. For
example, is the "she" of Marie
Celeste the same person in Loss?
Consider the two protagonists of A
Brace is Not a Couple and Not
to See a Bird:
"At
the back of the store, beneath shelves of porcelain cats, were bags of
confetti... 'Some look like guts,' she said, 'and red spaghetti.' He
wouldn’t make the obvious rhyme, though he saw through her eyes the
rising birds."
"The
noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws
the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him
asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside
him, has dreams - acres of corn-stalk, winter rag - pinioned by the
wing of his arm."
In the first story, the "she" makes a rhyme of
confetti and spaghetti. In the second, snow rhymes with crow. Again
there is a repetition of birds. In fact, Young seems to use the
repetition of certain words as connecting devices, such as snow, hand,
and ear.
There are also some themes that run through the
collection such as religion (Priest, Lily, God, Ark , Cardinal, St
Sebastian, St Avia’s Epistle, Eden), violence (drips, splatter, red)
and our relationship not only with others but with nature.
Water
is mentioned throughout many of the micros. Of micro fiction, Young
once commented that it’s both a visual language as well as a sonic one,
at once both dense and transparent. In fact, Young has been known to
collaborate with other media artists, as Christine Sajecki’s gorgeous
artwork in Easter Rabbit can
testify.
One gets a sense that the stories of Easter
Rabbit
are crafted from a sense of music as well as a mystery of daily life,
the relationships, tired or conflicted, that help to define us. Many of
the stories are, I suspect, meant to be read aloud for their sheer
music, slant rhyme, and alliteration, as in Girl:
"The
tadpoles flipped on the brown mud bottom. She dipped one out and held
it near, seeing it in her belly, shaping arms and feet and a small,
blond head. She set it back and stood, breasts out, arms up. The ducks
in the weed, eyes hard like hungry boys, waited for bread. She would
call, I hate you, or, I love you, and the ducks would scatter. She
would do neither.
the mud sucked her shoes, the minnows showed their silver stomachs and
rolled away."
There is also a strong sensory appeal in many of the stories, as The Long Daylight Night:
"The three walked up from the stone walls and trees, 4 AM. Their hands
smelled like paper, water, bridges, glue. They said goodnight and stood
there, jaws shining, teeth bright, going nowhere."
Young is very adept at what JA Taylor calls “the truncated sentence,”
that is, a sentence that has been pared back, yet allowing most of the
essence to shine through. I would add that by this very truncation, we
are allowed to experience this essence, if not able to totally
comprehend it by sheer intellect. And although these stories are small
in terms of word count, they are big in the sense of dealing with
beauty and pain in their many shades and disguises. In stories this
size, every word must count, even the titles. Consider the title: In the Light of No Understanding,
taken from the collection. The title alone has a kind of poetry about
it and adds more texture to the story. Or consider On Not to See a Bird:
"The
noodles boil to paste, blacken, catch fire. She comes home and throws
the pot into the snow, a hissing startled crow. Upstairs, she finds him
asleep, eyes clenched to the plumes of acrid smoke. She slides beside
him, has dreams - acres of corn-stalk, winter rag - pinioned by the
wing of his arm."
In
such few and well-chosen words, we are given a sense of an emergency,
and at the story’s end, we believe that a change has occurred,
something both profound, yet delicate.
In all fairness, this
collection is not for everyone. Those who liked their fiction
well-defined or gobbled up and forgotten after a single reading, will
find Easter Rabbit vexing.
But in its open-ended form, in its prism-like prose, this is one book
that the reader can return to again and again to see new meanings. In
that sense, I believe the book is worth far more than its price.
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