Chris
Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel.
Rose Metal Press, $15.95 paperback (328p) ISBN: 978-0-9887645-8-3
If you read the stunning 2011
release They
Could No Longer Contain Themselves, you know
the strength of Rose Metal Press’ compilations.
My Very End of the Universe is
no exception. The book, focusing on the
novella-in-flash, is the perfect combination of hybrid text and education that
the press is known for. Billing itself
as “a study of the form,” the book is comprised of reprints of the 2011 and
2012 Rose Metal chapbook contest winners, Betty Superman by Tiff Holland and Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel, alongside the
novellas Here, Where We Live by Meg
Pokrass, Bell and Bargain by Margaret
Patton Chapman, and The Family Dogs by
Chris Bower. Each novella begins with a
craft-based essay by the author, and the collection is introduced by Rose
Metal’s own Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, exploring the genres and
histories of flash, the novella, and the novella-in-flash and adding a new
level to the reader’s interaction with the text.
Some works feel more traditionally
like novellas, like Patton Chapman’s and Pokrass’, with arcs and
resolutions. Teel’s flashes, while not
linear, spiral around an event and around a boy’s coming of age, developing in
the way we might expect from a novella.
Meanwhile, Holland and Bower’s work take less traditional (even for a
novella-in-flash) routes, Holland’s work resembling linked stories and Bower’s
work similar to a set of monologues.
Not only does each separate novella
explore the different variations of the novella-in-flash, but they are also
linked thematically through stories of family.
The book could be a study of mothers—Teel’s angelic figure coddling her
son, Pokrass’ single mother undergoing chemotherapy and choosing the wrong man
out of loneliness, Holland’s tough and candy-saturated Betty who “keeps her
money in a Pringles can. She used to use
a Benefiber jar, but then her husband got all healthy and found her stash so
she switched places.”
It could just as well be a study of
coming of age through the centuries, including Patton Chapman’s stunning period
portrait of three children in the dirty slums of Chicago. Paul tries to be the man of the house, the
only inheritance of his father, a picture of a naked woman dressed as Lady Justice
“because it has a sword, and young boys love swords.” Angry middle-child Abe keeps a knife in his
pocket and thinks, “I can hurt you,” when he sees strangers pass by. Bell, who was touched with the ability to
speak at birth, gets her first lesson in reality when she allows a boy to look
at her naked and he remarks, “You’re not much, really.” Her brothers later find
her, “sitting in the parlor by the coal fire, her undergarment on the rug, half
a box of matches burnt around her, singing her own name.”
It could be a study of the
differences and similarities between boys and girls growing. Teel’s twelve-year-old Cherry Tree is trying
out girls for the first time—“When she leaned over me, a cross on a chain
slipped free from her shirt and I touched it with my tongue. I thought
wildly that Dad, sunburned and tired with his baseball and beer, had never done
anything like that,”—all the while torturing his best friend to win the
affections of his delinquent stepbrother.
Pokrass’ teenage Abby is getting used to her changing body and the
attention she doesn’t want—“Junie says people who don’t like attention are gay,
which makes no sense, and has nothing to do with anything.” Bower’s Al looks back at his childhood and
laments that there were no pictures taken of him or his brother. All he’s left with are posed driver’s
licenses and school pictures, which are “just mug shots, pictures where you
don’t look like yourself.” Each novella also
shows us the complications class brings to a family dynamic, while showing the
reader the universality of family.
Rose Metal has made a mark with its
study of hybrid text, but to the reader who doesn’t wish to be a student of
literature, to the reader who only wants to read, My Very End of the Universe offers just what we need: beauty, grief,
anger, humor, and some great stories. (November 2014)
Purchase My Very End of the Universe HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield is the author of the novel How
to Catch a Coyote. Her work has appeared in Mississippi Review
online, Salt Hill Journal, the Collagist, Newfound,
and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
