This collection feels like rifling around in your bag for your phone, but finding a rabbit instead. Did you put that rabbit there? Were you really looking for your phone? Where did the rabbit come from? Why can’t you remember why you went to look in your bag in the first place? Is that your bag?I enjoy very short fiction, and much like Sing to It, this collection is also crammed with very short stories. Nicolette Polek has a gift, and she can say more with one tiny paragraph than others can say in full-length novels.
The most experienced swimmer can drown at the hands of someone who cannot swim. A weak swimmer will probably drown at the hands of one who just learned. The one who aggressively knows nothing can have more power over someone who is still in the process of knowing something.
Polek’s characters are young, old, lost, and found. They cling to old traditions, and they pull new facts out of the air.
“Ezra Pound also made vibrators by putting bumblebees in glass jars,” he says, “and after orgasming would throw them at pedestrians from her seventh-floor apartment in Paris.” He turns his attention back to the tennis match.
I had to stop myself from quoting entire stories in this review; there are quite a few that are mere sentences long but crammed full of evocative and grandly melancholy ideas. I have a real weak spot for melancholy. This book will leave you in a fog, but it’s nothing to be worried about. Sometimes fog is nice. Sometimes it is a blanket.
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