Wayson: American Husband

American Husband

Kary Wayson

Life is a mystery, a puzzle, “a house of inscrutable signals,” leaving us “often stranded in the middle of a feeling.” With exquisite manipulation of language, the poems in this collection seek to unravel the mystery and solve the puzzle by parsing everyday experiences—observing life while lying about on the couch, on the floor, in bed and out—and everyday relationships—between the self and the mother, the self and the father, the self and the lover, the self and the self, and the self and god. English, “the telephone and the telephone book and the table with one vase and the cut rose,” is the means through which Wayson, drawing not only on her own wisdom but also on that of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Shajahana, Mother Goose, Federico Garcia Lorca, Edward Gorey, and others, enacts intersections between self and meaning. At each intersection, love’s loneliness forms and dissolves, expands and contracts, and then passes much like weather, or the mysterious changeable relationship between silence and words. Wayson may feel that she lives “with a desk where nothing gets done,” but with every poem she finds “some nook or cranny to plumb, some crook or nanny dumb enough to tell them what,” and another puzzle piece falls in place.

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Eggers: The Departure Lounge

The Departure Lounge

Paul Eggers

What happens when people land on unfamiliar moral and cultural turf? The five stories in Paul Eggers’ The Departure Lounge examine that question, focusing on characters in either voluntary or involuntary exile—men and women forced to confront their deepest emotions and beliefs, removed from familiar, comforting surroundings.

In one story an academic flees his family, arriving in Africa only to find that his African host is dealing with a similar crisis. In another, an American chess hustler in Africa is forced to come to terms with his own sense of right and wrong. In yet another, an old Vietnamese man now living in California finds that his relationship with his now-dead daughter was not what he had assumed. In the story “Hey,” a young chess star confronts the death of his brother in the Vietnam War. And in the final story, an aging American couple—former UN relief workers—return to their refugee-camp worksite in Malaysia, discovering what they had forgotten about themselves.

In lyrical, tough-minded prose, Eggers’ stories illuminate in unexpected ways the profundity of cross-cultural experiences, as well as deliver fresh insights into the complexity of identity.

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Jahna: True Kin

True Kin

Ric Jahna

Ranging from the clay roads of Central Florida to the American Desert Southwest, the stories of True Kin foreground a cast of recurring characters engaged in battles both public and private, epic and mundane. The lead-off story, “Independence Day, 1983,” winner of an AWP Intro Award, introduces a lakeside family barbeque, where class tensions and long-held grudges threaten to burst forth with dangerous consequences. In “Making Weight,” a jumbo-sized high school wrestler struggles against his unpredictable body to lose six very important pounds. In “Release Statement,” a troubled young woman attempts to make sense of her longtime obsession with Bob Barker of The Price Is Right fame. An unsuspecting adjunct professor, in “Hurricane Party, 2002,” finds himself thrust suddenly into a violent confrontation with his former student. Rendered in meticulously crafted prose, these nine stories and one novella are grounded soundly in the dramatic moment, while probing deeply into the larger mysteries of the human condition. Seekers all, Jahna’s characters brave the often absurd trials of contemporary life in an ongoing search for community, meaning, and love.

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