- In Corporeality, Hollis Seamon’s latest fiction collection, we meet the cat lady, the professor dealing with a plagiarist while coping with personal hardships, sibling rivalry of the unnaturally cursed kind, the dog that goes beyond everyday dog sense and scent to protect its owners. These are some of the eclectic characters and settings that make Corporeality irresistible and difficult to put down once you’ve started reading. Like her preceding collection Body Work and mystery novel Flesh, this book is a testament to Seamon’s ample gifts as a storyteller.
PRAISE FOR CORPOREALITY:
Hollis Seamon’s Corporeality is a wonderful collection of stories, dazzling and unsentimental, full of everyday tragedies, fairy-tale motifs, and rambunctious, life-affirming characters who stand up to bullies and to fate, whether in a hospice, a flophouse, or a university classroom. It’s a feast of language that you won’t soon forget.
—Alan Davis, author of So Bravely Vegetative and Alone with the Owl
The characters in Corporeality are smart. Smart enough to see that the world is chaos and decay, but sometimes too smart for their jobs, whether they’re professors or trash collectors. And they are way too smart for their undependable bodies, which is the great rub of Hollis Seamon’s fine and original stories. How do we cope, these carefully calibrated stories ask, when our minds grow daily more perceptive and sharp and witty, yet the darkness still approaches?
—Dave King, author of The Ha-Ha
What a magical collection! Hollis Seamon’s enchanting stories will make you marvel anew at the forever strange, blessed, and heart-breaking affliction we share as human beings on this earth. Seamon’s lovingly-rendered characters will linger in your memory for a long, long time.
—Edward Schwarzschild, author of Responsible Men
These stories make memorable the people you wonder about in passing—the cat lady, the deformed, the witness to a questionable death, the professor who walks out of class never to return, the teen boy in hospice, the neighbors of the crazy, victims of acts of god, the loveless and forlorn. Written with both humor and pathos, the quirky characters in Hollis Seamon’s stories drew me in and left me, as she writes, “astonished by life.”
—Eugenia Kim, author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter
These stories have grace, wit, adventure, danger, humor, compassion, magic, and rage. Hollis Seamon casts full and dazzling light on those who are often overlooked—teenaged lovebirds in hospice, flood victims before the flood, plagiarists, arsonists, old ladies, fat dogs. She brings them to life so tenderly and powerfully that they stay with you, long after the last page.
—Nalini Jones, author of What You Call Winter
Latest
Review of Matthew Hamilton’s THE LAND OF THE FOUR RIVERS
Review of Matthew A.Hamilton’s (Armenia 2006-08; Philippines 2008-10) The Land of the Four Rivers
Please click here for full review.
The Land of the Four Rivers:
My Experience as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Armenia (2006-2008)
by Matthew A. Hamilton (Armenia 2006-08; Philippines 2008-10)
?ervená Barva Press (http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/)
$7.00
42 pages
2012
Reviewed by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala 1991-93)
As Returned Peace Corps Volunteers, we all, I feel confident saying, have at least a couple of photographs documenting our service. (Some of us doubtless have crates-or iPhones-full of them.) Because we were there, because we know the people and the settings in the photographs, we have a particular attachment to them. They call up full and rich and even complicated memories and associations. To us, each photograph is worth more than a thousand words. Each is a mini-novella, a long poem.
But anyone who didn’t have the experiences we had and is seeing the photographs cold knows only what is in front of their eyes. A photo of the family we lived next door to in the mountains of Bolivia or on the plains of Kenya might evoke in us an epic saga of love and hardship, of courage and defeat and hope. The person to whom we show the photo might simply remark, “Wow, it must have been a hot day if that’s all those people were wearing!”
Most of the poems in Matthew Hamilton’s chapbook The Land of the Four Rivershave the look of three-by-five photographs, with a dozen ormore lines of more or less equal length. And like good photographs, they are colorful evocations, careful snapshots of what he saw and experienced in Armenia. But unlike with Peace Corps photographs, no one is likely to find anything tangential and inessential to comment on in Hamilton’s poems. This is a testament to his poems’ clarity and accessibility. (They do what a surprising number of modern poems are too cowardly to do: They risk being understood.) If his poems were photographs, we would not only see them, we would step into them.
Take, for example, the opening of “Expedition into Mystery”:
I walk over to a woman selling apricots
and buy a half kilo. Her gold teeth thank me.
Then I walk to Gorki Park, pluck one
of my treats out of the bag and take a bite.
Some of the juice falls on the sidewalk.
A dog walks over and licks it up.
The storytelling is straightforward, the images (apricots, gold teeth) concrete. Encounters with voracious, half-starved but somehow gentle street dogs are as common in Volunteers’ experiences as episodes of homesickness, and the apricot-juice-devouring dog of the poem will therefore resonate with former Volunteers. But the dog is equally likely to resonate with non-Volunteers. Although the poet doesn’t specify that the animal is a street dog, context suggests it. Here’s a dog desperate enough to drink fruit juice off of concrete. The connotation is negative: the country doesn’t care for its animals. But there’s a positive implication as well: not much is wasted here. (One of the consolations of serving in a poor part of the world is how little is thrown away.)
Mark Brazaitis is the author of The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Award from the University of Notre Dame Press, and four other books. His novel Julia & Rodrigo is forthcoming from Gival Press in 2013. He is a professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University.
Da Chen’s My Last Empress receives a starred Kirkus review!
MFA Faculty member Da Chen’s latest novel, My Last Empress, has received a starred Kirkus review!
Nabokov meets Dream of the Red Chamber.
“Chen (Brothers, 2006, etc.), a Chinese-born writer and now resident of New York’s Hudson Valley, has a profoundly developed feel for the sweep of history—though here, unlike in Brothers, he compresses what might have been a saga into 300 pages. His story has an epic feel all the same: Samuel Pickens, a Yankee born into wealth and privilege, falls into head-swooning love with the daughter of a New England missionary who has spent her youth in China.”
To read the entire review please click here !
“Good Things” by Nick Knittel, Winner of the Fairfield Prize, now available
“Spare, tightly constructed and meticulously crafted, these stories tell of lives of lower-middle-class Americans, the isolated and marginalized people many of our contemporary writers somehow manage not to notice. These are tough, realistic and well-told stories. Knittel has a deep understanding of his characters and their complicated and often hopeless circumstances, but he doesn’t judge them. He writes of them with compassion, and, as he does, the reader cannot help but be moved too.” – Charles Simic
The MFA program at Fairfield University was one of the greatest experiences I could have had as a writer. Nestled on the beautiful Enders Island, the program provided a solid and tight-knit community of students that, by the end of the first day, felt less like a group of strangers meeting for the first time and more like the long-lost family I never knew I had. It is a vibrant, diverse, and highly talented group of individuals that raised my skills as a writer higher than I ever thought possible. The two years of education, inspiration, and friendships have created a lifetime of memories. – Nick Knittel
Fairfield 2.0
