Indeed, Marrowbone
delivers to the reader a strange world of stories filled with unusual narratives
and creatures, including one of the most intriguing characters in this slim
volume, a bony animal-like figure who befriends a fellow traveler:
"That night the sun gave swift surrender to the
butter-pale half moon. I fell asleep with ground squirrel and cold water in my
stomach, the bonebuck’s ribs bracing my spine, and I dreamed a sky full of
crows layered dozens-thick between the clouds and earth. Bones were strewn all
through the field around me—ribs and limbs cast askew like forgotten omens.
Snow came down through the crows’ wings, stacking up around the bones and settling
on my boots…"
The stories in this book lead the reader to some fascinating
and unexpected places, and we never lose our confidence in Ms. Kreitzer’s
vision and skill as we journey along with her characters. Chelsea Ardle, one of the publishers of Marrowbone and co-founder of Beetnik
Press, shared with me her impressions of Ms. Kreitzer’s take on the natural
world and of the chapbook itself:
"Marrowbone"
takes the reader to places unknown, and yet, emotionally familiar—a woman going
through her time of the month, trying to find some comfort; a girl trying to
find her rhythm on a path unknown; a love lost. In her fictional tales,
Kreitzer uses subtle symbolism to tell old stories through new eyes. In her
descriptions of place, I think it is easy to recognize the author's own ties to
land. I will tell you here that Kreitzer is a strong supporter of being
barefoot for as long as it is possible during the year. Her feet are calloused
and knowledgeable of the places she has walked, the land she lives on. This
fact, shows through in the chapbooks stories to me, especially
"Threefold."
As I read this volume, I couldn’t help but be impressed by
the way Ms. Kreitzer distills the mysterious into concrete terms. A native of Maine, she cites as one of her
writerly influences John Prine, “who is a quiet master of earth-stained truth
and humor,” and has said of her own connection to place: “I love the woods and
the dirt and the shared heritage of stoicism. Being from Maine means knowing
something about space and silence. I’m
grateful for that.” Ms. Kreitzer has
proven herself an expert in those very topics via the earthy yet elusive
stories in this collection.
Read on to learn
about a few more chapbooks…
After hearing Lorena Williams read from her new nonfiction chapbook
Relic last week in Braddock, PA, I
quickly became enamored with the honest resilience of her prose. While she is currently a writing teacher at two
universities, the bio on the back of the book also tells me that she has played
the roles of “Wilderness Ranger… wildland firefighter…and…whitewater guide,” so
by the time I open her chapbook to the first page, her well-wrought descriptions
of place don’t surprise so much as thrill the restless wanderer buried
somewhere within me. Her descriptions of
the natural environment are shot through with a quiet kind of beauty:
“My jog takes me
along the ditch road past rolling hills of sagebrush, the windswept Oregon
desert silent but for the tee-dee,
tee-dee of pygmy nuthatches
huddled together in the morning sun. The crunch of my shoes through crusty snow
disturbs the tiny blue-gray birds into a chattering departure, only for them to
alight on the very same branches moments after I pass.”
Ms. Williams displays a finely tuned sense of place in these
tales, as befits her biography on the back cover. I find myself intrigued with this description
of the author’s roots: “A native of the
American West, Lorena Williams has long preferred rock to brick, sage to
streets.” Released by Appaloosa Press, Relic displays the tension between the
Oregon landscape of Ms. Williams’ roots and the Pittsburgh cityscape that is
her more recent home:
“Content with the reasonably unchanged
vista—the cows, the distant tractor making its way up Graham Boulevard—I turn
toward home and prepare to lie.
“No—I actually really like living in a city,” I say through a
mouthful of scrambled egg. “It’s great being so close to everything, you know?
I ride my bike pretty much everywhere.”
Throughout Relic, Ms.
Williams confides in the reader as she explores a kind of longing for the land
of her childhood, and we can only respond with appreciation for the beauty of both
her landscapes, real and longed-for, and her words themselves.
And finally, Shannon Hozinec’s
chapbook Unbridaled, a book of poems,
makes its debut this week. According to
her bio, Ms. Hozinec is a Pittsburgh poet who “is powered by an oft-lethal
combination of whiskey and hairspray!” I
appreciate the humor in this description, though the majority of poems featured
in the book are of a more serious nature than this brief blurb.
According to the
publisher, this intriguing collection of poems “examines what happens in a
post-apocalyptic society after a pseudo-human creature corrals a horde of
lostlings under his wing. It engages with bloodlust and dominance, sacrifice
and self-preservation, gender relegation and destruction – with what is earth,
what is meat, and what is unalienable within us all.” An earthy kind of premise, indeed! While this description sounds terrfying to me, the poetry itself is a gift of surprising images and juxtapositions such as this one:
The sky ate and ate, clutching
the open spaces in our jaws where
it flashed through and became the world.
and this one from later in the same poem:
Past the hungry days, gathered,
a collective--
shudder as we remember how it felt to eat our least favorite dogs.
The sky ate and ate, clutching
the open spaces in our jaws where
it flashed through and became the world.
and this one from later in the same poem:
Past the hungry days, gathered,
a collective--
shudder as we remember how it felt to eat our least favorite dogs.
On the whole, I found Ms. Hozinec’s use of language to be thought-provoking and often astonishing. Witness for yourself in an excerpt from "The Melting Town":
Besmeared with mud as we were--
as we walked, we created the ground. And oh,
we are such a wooden bunch,
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