180 pages
Published 2022
Read October 20
Rating: N/A (I liked it a lot!)
It feels weird to review an anthology one of my pieces is in, an anthology edited by a friend of mine and dotted with poems and stories from writers I know. An anthology where I'm mentioned in the acknowledgements. Weird, maybe even borderline unethical. But it's not like anyone reads this blog on the regular.
HELL IS REAL began when I tweeted something along the lines of "Someone who isn't me should put together a Midwest Gothic anthology." Jack, an amazing writer in his own right, was taken with the idea, and put in an immense amount of labor reading through submissions and compiling this book. There are a grand total of seventy poems, flash fics, and short stories in here, too many to review one by one.
There are some repeating themes and motifs: Driving and roadsides. Urban decay and rot in the cornfields. Deer. Not-deer. Blood. Burial. Childhood trauma. Religious trauma. Apostacy writ in biblical imagery. Queerness. And as with so much stuff getting published in the indie lit press these days, a great number of these pieces are astoundingly good -- all-time bangers, even.
A running list of some of my favorites:
"When Me and the Other Ex-Mormons Get to Outer Darkness" by K.A. Nielsen
"Postcard from Bluegrass" by Elizabeth Walztoni
"Storm Day" by MP Armstrong
"Welcoming Remarks from Tim Busch, Pillar of the Community" by Amanda Minkkinen
"Cowboy Killers & Corn Fields & Coming Home" by Camille Ferguson
"Poachers" by Andrew McSorley
"We Have All Come from the Earth and in the Earth Is Where We Will Go" by Rowan Bagley
"Kerosene" by Lucy Frost
"The Angel at Harvest Church" by Freydís Moon
"Tornadoland" by Hattie Jean Hayes
"Without Protest" by Cassie E. Brown
"Shelter / Decay" by Andrea Lianne Grabowski
"Local Woman Discovers Remains of Two Girls, 10 and 6, Missing Since 1977" by Kimberly Glanzman
"Blood and Beatitude in the Buckeye State" by Alana Greene
"When the Anthropocene Ends in the Rust Belt, or When the Gods Decide to Repent" by John E.K. Carter
"Seek" by Pippa Russell
"65" by Audrey Hollis
Despite singling out all those poems and stories, I can say that I liked or loved every piece in this book, and I'm only slightly biased.
No comments:
Post a Comment