MAY WE FEED THE KING by Rebecca Perry

The unnamed narrator of poet Perry’s debut novel is hired to historically reenact the rooms of a 750-year-old castle in England. She studies a particular king, one third in line after the deaths of his two brothers, who resists his new position. The novel is divided into two parts: the present-day dealings between the curator and the castle’s archivist. The curator wants to learn details of this king’s everyday life in the castle that give the viewer a sense of who he was as a person. The second part places us inside the castle with the king during his reign. The plot is about fiction and storytelling, both in the visual portrayal set by the curator and the brief, documented account set down by the king—a merging of both into a riveting story of how stories are shaped by interpretation.

Favorite line(s): Until recently, the replica fruits were scattered around the Royal Station of Agricultural Chemistry, abandoned for almost a hundred years, wrapped in boxes and stored on shelves. There was so much material that it took ten years to get the museum ready for opening. And so, we have this incredible, detailed record of things that once existed, all thanks to Garnier Valletti. The skins of the apples shine as if caught in the lights, they have real stalks, blemishes. He used powdered wool to capture the skin of peaches and apricots, and finely crushed white stone on the grapes, having moved to other fruit once the apples were all accounted for. But tell me, what does this incredible feat of record keeping not tell us?

. . .Then the archivist, who could not help themself: To make us confront, one day, what we have lost.

POTTED MEAT by Steven Dunn

Dunn lights a torch to the flash fiction form with Potted Meat and Water & Power (summary below)—but not to burn it down but to give it illumination in such a bright and delirious way. Both books are published as novels but read like guides for surviving both a childhood in West Virginia and the Navy (in Water & Power). Dunn divides Potted Meat into three sections: Lift Tab, Peel Back, and Enjoy Contents. Potted Meat is a metaphor for growing up in poverty but believing you’re slightly more content because you’re at least eating something and have a roof over your head. The short, lyrical sections, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, sometimes a sentence or two, deal with the author’s unsentimental take on racism and poverty, abusive parents, alcoholism, drug dealing, puberty, and disappointments galore. His goal is to escape West Virginia and his family, attend college, and study architecture. No one is rooting for the narrator. No money. No social services to help him fulfill his dream. So he picks the Navy only so he can pay for college when he gets out. A short, deep novel that wakes you up to how most people actually live. Enlightening. Necessary.  

Favorite line(s):  We hop on the trash truck and start collecting before the sun fully rises. In the alley a bloody-mouthed raccoon gnaws on a white baby shoe. It stands on a mattress with piss stains. A yellow blob of chicken fat traced by a trail of ants. The chicken fat slugs along a mucus path. A batch of flies pile on the exposed red tendons and bone of a deer leg severed at the knee. Three rat-like kittens moan like babies in a soggy cardboard box. The fourth kitten is silent. Only the head remains. Its deflated body lies shredded on the other end of the mattress. Draped across the tops of three trash cans are large bouquets of funeral flowers, wilted off-white and droopy pink roses buried in full deep green leaves. The sun peeks over the mountains, rays poking through fog, tinting everything soft yellow.

WATER & POWER by Steven Dunn

Like Potted Meat, Dunn has written Water & Power as a novel. In short chapters, some with added graphics, some graphics alone, Dunn writes about the racism, sexism, and homophobia in military culture, specifically the Navy. The narrator (Dunn himself) has joined the service to escape poverty in rural West Virginia. Once enlisted, the narrator realizes the military has its own laws and rules. He doesn’t have to make a case for the system’s faults; instead, he lets others in the Navy tell their stories through short interviews. The violence of war is never more evident in the twenty-two pages of names listed of those who died in the Middle East. Dunn challenges the novel form by giving you facts on the page and in photos. It’s a hard read but well worth the effort.  

Favorite line(s): We are the live wires. It is difficult to know where the circuit begins. Did we start acting like the movies or the movies started acting like us or both influenced each other or both are lying to themselves about our image, which is reduced to a few types: ruff-n-tuff, hard-lovin’ yet tender, hard-drinkin’ barely intelligent robotic super patriotic heroic defender of everything good. True, there are those caricatures. But we are also apathetic, ashamed, terrified, un-patriotic, vulnerable, anti-heroic, math geniuses, dope-dealers, preachers, coke-sniffers, painters wife-beaters, pedophiles, stand-up cats, and no-good motherfuckers.

BODY LANGUAGE by Meg Howrey 

Three sisters convene at their mother’s house in Indiana to discuss next steps in her advancing Alzheimer’s. Barbara has no plans to live out her life with the disease and elicits the help of her youngest daughter, Nanette, an Episcopal nun, to end her life. Sloane, a therapist in the thick of perimenopause, and Laurel, married and the mother of two, who works for an environmental organization and suspects her husband is having an affair, have no such ideas. They come up with a plan. Sloane will uproot her life and come live with their mom. The other two sisters have their own ideas of the end of their mother’s life. There’s humor, love, and the all-too-proud avoidant behavior family members refer to when vulnerability feels scarier.   

Favorite line(s): They had discovered that when you hold a vigil for your possibly dying mother, you will also think of other things. Not just thinking of work, of children, of your own bodily needs, but also a remembered scene from a movie that had nothing to do with the situation at hand, or an imagined ending of a conversation from three weeks ago. Even Nanette would find this to be true. Grief, unlike ducks, does not travel in a row.