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I just finished Skels by Maggie Dubris. It's another one of the books, like mine, nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in lesbian fiction (I want to read them all), and it's so good.
It opens with Orlie, the narrator, sprawled on the hood of her cousin's car, eating Cap'n Crunch and staring at a rickety little house where the laws of gravity don't apply. The laws of gravity -- of giving serious matters serious attention, and of hanging onto the planet in the commonly prescribed manner -- both do and do not apply throughout this breathtaking, lyrical, gorgeously ambitious humdinger of a book. It reminded me of Catch-22 and the work of Williams S. Burroughs in the strange turns of its meditations on work as an ambulance driver in New York City and the lives and deaths of the people the ambulance is summoned to attend to. The phyiscal facts of each emergency is very explicit -- the surroundings, the wounds, what errands or eating or betting the medics had been doing before finally getting a call. Everything starts out strange and keeps getting stranger as writers and musicians and their creations from earlier times take new forms in the book, and riddles, mysteries and chaos pull the story down the street and make it crawl under fences. I liked it a lot, especially something about the spirit of it that I'm finding hard to put into words -- in the midst of much urban urgency, a kind of old fashioned faith in the power of art and a tenderness for the wildness in people, and in the worth and unbelievably strange and powerful stories of each life. Plus, big, big pleasure in the sounds of language, and very open, straight-up faith in poetry, a hologram submarine billboard and a strangely obsessive cop hunting an elusive albino, and all.
It's published by Soft Skull, which seems to be putting out such interesting stuff.
It opens with Orlie, the narrator, sprawled on the hood of her cousin's car, eating Cap'n Crunch and staring at a rickety little house where the laws of gravity don't apply. The laws of gravity -- of giving serious matters serious attention, and of hanging onto the planet in the commonly prescribed manner -- both do and do not apply throughout this breathtaking, lyrical, gorgeously ambitious humdinger of a book. It reminded me of Catch-22 and the work of Williams S. Burroughs in the strange turns of its meditations on work as an ambulance driver in New York City and the lives and deaths of the people the ambulance is summoned to attend to. The phyiscal facts of each emergency is very explicit -- the surroundings, the wounds, what errands or eating or betting the medics had been doing before finally getting a call. Everything starts out strange and keeps getting stranger as writers and musicians and their creations from earlier times take new forms in the book, and riddles, mysteries and chaos pull the story down the street and make it crawl under fences. I liked it a lot, especially something about the spirit of it that I'm finding hard to put into words -- in the midst of much urban urgency, a kind of old fashioned faith in the power of art and a tenderness for the wildness in people, and in the worth and unbelievably strange and powerful stories of each life. Plus, big, big pleasure in the sounds of language, and very open, straight-up faith in poetry, a hologram submarine billboard and a strangely obsessive cop hunting an elusive albino, and all.
It's published by Soft Skull, which seems to be putting out such interesting stuff.
