Kaaron WarrenInto Bones Like Oil

Abstract

move away, some living (they know) inauthentically, but—all the same— satisfied. Can teen infatuation lead to anything good? Will doubts erode satisfaction ? Questions that tease the mind into imagining—and reading—lives on other pages. Granted, some people are snapshots , diminished by irony. The twoyear -old who senses that he has lost control of the big people around him; the four-year-old trying to create order in the small world of his toys. Evoked sympathy, certainly, but at a distance. An adult voice places them, someone standing nearby, not inside the children. Arrested in development , imagined as pre-adults. Other characters, thankfully, not so stopped. Some making peace through faith, the saving pleasure of a memory, to create as well as fading senses allow, to joke against eternity. The woman who hides her hands, after decades of service, hands that must surely be works of art to God; another who “just knows now that even God has his flaws.” A certain sadness comes through. Often, the characters seem isolated, contained within themselves. If they connect, it’s because they remind the reader of certain moments of self-reflection. Dialogue is rare. Community, if mentioned, is usually a context; contributing to, creating community seems secondary. A man who finds “friendship . . . from the ashes of two different desperations,” a welcome reprieve. Yet Nathan Brown doesn’t assume the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of a god as he assembles his human comedy. We do not know everything. The poems are not always finished or polished, standing as they do for incomplete lives. A dark textured cover takes and holds our fingerprints. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Kaaron Warren Into Bones Like Oil Atlanta. Meerkat Press. 2019. 100 pages. KAARON WARREN RELIVES her fascination with ghosts and, like every great writer, steals her stories from the everyday. But nothing is everyday in where she takes you. Into Bones Like Oil is a nonimposing story that is a big haunting for the unsettling themes it explores. In the gentle ticking of a clock, the silent roll of a sea, the narrative invites us into protagonist Dora’s solitude. The story discloses a mother’s guilt. We are trapped with Dora inside a shipwrecked house and its shipwrecked occupants, and all its visiting ghosts. As in such (multi) award-winning works as Tide of Stone (2018) and The Grief Hole (2016), Warren lulls you with deceptively simple text into a complex oddity, where all characters are nearly appealing in their flaws. Like Trevor, who is handsome in an immature way; short and bouncy, he’s like a little Fluffy. Like ex-sailor Luke, easy on the eye, so full of secrets. Like big Larry, so strong, his handshake could break bone. Like Roy, with the skin disease, the landlord who lures specters, who takes advantage of sleepers—conduits to ghosts and their stories. Warren enchants you with what she tells, what she doesn’t tell. There is an omnipresent suspense inside a vivid sense of place, a most gloomy place: “The bathroom was tiled, floor and walls, in pale purple with gold streaks. It gave the room an odd glow, because the light fitting was set high in the ceiling and dim due to dust and insects in the pale green glass globe. The toilet was old but clean.” There are smells everywhere: wet hair, hot metal, musk. And sound: feet, cars, the tick tock of an unseen clock. The prose is quietly ruthless. A reveal about something dreadful, like an infant torn live from a hung woman’s belly, falls out of a normal conversation about something else. There is almost a monotony to the story, yet just as you relax there are shadows of people in the room. Into Bones Like Oil is Kaaron Warren in her element. Her summons into a wine bar of sorts. For ghosts. Shipwrecked ones. And nothing is innocent. Not even you. Eugen Bacon Swinburne University of Technology Rodrigo Márquez Tizano Jakarta Trans. Thomas Bunstead. Minneapolis. Coffee House Press. 2019. 160 pages. JAKARTA (Yakarta in the original Spanish ) is a taut novel set in an unnamed city beset by plague and social unrest, where...