![]() ![]() Where There Is Ruin employs a strategy that seems more like a kind of gallows optimism. While it is more often than not an indicator of intelligence or wit, it is (at least in this writer’s case) also an effective way of avoiding dipping into being overly sentimental or melodramatic. And then you will fall to the floor crying,” wrote Richard Siken, “… and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.” It is the means of coping we are perhaps most accustomed to - or at least seem to revere the most - the sort that touches upon the ridiculousness hidden in devastation. “Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. So often is great writing praised for its gallows humor, its ability to parse the comical from pathos. ![]() In one of the five stories in Samuel Snoek-Brown‘s Where There Is Ruin (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016), a character trapped in the World Trade Center experiences a strange, sudden relief when a coworker manages to break open a window: “that rush of cold morning air pushed her hair away from her face and the sky was so clean, so blue, and her lungs felt cold and she had this moment of clarity … she’d seen the sunrise, she’d felt the wind under her arms, she felt so free, she felt so alive.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |