L. M. BrownWere We Awake

Abstract

With this book, I think, Ungváry serves well the cause of neglected national selfanalysis and the cause of democracy without qualifying epithets. George Gömöri London L. M. Brown Were We Awake Burlington, Vermont. Fomite. 2019. 236 pages. BOOKENDED BY A lyric from Emily Dickinson’s “We dream – it is good we are dreaming,” and from which its title is appropriately borrowed, Were We Awake is author L. M. Brown’s 2019 collection of short stories examining life and loss in rural Ireland. Consisting of tales that seem to exist simultaneously in all times and in no time at all, the effect Brown achieves here is illusory and appositely dreamlike, reading as both nostalgic and jarringly current. Were We Awake capably braids together all the love and lust and loss that round out our lives—those things that make us so tragically and impossibly human. Steeped in death and disillusion, all distinctly Irish, these vignettes are inhabited by fully realized characters living fully realized lives punctuated by a million fully realized losses (of innocence, of ignorance, of marriage, of performance , of identity), which Brown explores adeptly and through a multigenerational lens. Loss scathes and shatters and stays with these characters; it shunts them together and propels them forward, a paradox that suggests the common thread between them, between us, is not life, after all, but death. Brown has produced a collection not about death or bereavement necessarily but, at its core, about human [dis]connection; we are bound and unbound by our ability to love and to grieve and to lose everything. While Brown’s stand-alone stories are shorter and punchier and tidily self-contained , there’s a quiet sort of brilliance in those that return to and build upon their predecessors (“Communion” / ”Flight,” “Confession” / “Anniversaries” / “Games They Played”), for it is in these stories that Brown has married Dickensian sprawl and Dickinsonian sensibility and somehow contained them in twenty or fewer pages. Pair that with perceptive use of metaphor throughout (the sea is a mirror of a relationship on the verge of imploding, or caged birds, the inability to let go of the past) and the sharp imagery only a native could conjure, and you have Were We Awake, an ideological Celtic knot, which, despite intermittently patchy editing, is an effective and thought-provoking collection. This is a quick read worthy of being devoured in one sitting and savored in another. Logan Webb Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Kate Wisel Driving in Cars with Homeless Men Pittsburgh. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019. 185 pages. IN HER TOUR DE FORCE debut collection , Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, Kate Wisel weaves the stories of four women: Serena, Frankie, Raffa, and Natalya. Her protagonists, adrift yet assured, are fettered to one another by friendship, their ferocious hunger for human connection, their withstanding of abuse and its insidious violence, and their ever-present belief in possibility and redemption. Garbed in black jeans, black hoodies, and black-inked tattoos , they represent Boston’s working class, its disenfranchised, its drug-hazed denizens and misfits. Wisel deftly shifts between points of view and writes with verve, incisive detail, and a poet’s attention to tempo and cadence. Narratively and chronologically, the temporal terrain of these twenty linked stories is perpetually shifting. The reader moves between their childhoods, their present-day lives, and their futures—sometimes in the span of just a few pages. Hers is an unflinching , laser-focused portrayal of violence and how relational violence informs the trajectory of one’s life—your friendships, intimacy , opportunities, and well-being. Serena, her utterances the most pronounced in this chorus of female voices, becomes a victim of domestic and physical abuse at the hands of her boyfriend, Niko. In the story “Trouble,” Niko gives her a puppy (aptly named Trouble) as an apology WORLDLIT.ORG 109 ...