I have a tendency to overanalyze when writing a review. Maybe it’s some subconscious reflex that says if I throw enough comparative words and things that sound high-concept like the human condition or a postmodern exploration of meditations, it’ll make up for the times I want to say, ‘Dude, this totally slays eleven different ways.’ Maybe it’s just covering up that I’m afraid I have no idea what I’m talking about. Or maybe I just want to live in that world longer. See reason #3 for the winner of Rose Metal Press’ 4th annual short short chapbook competition, Mary Hamilton’s We know what we are.
The best way to find an entry into this collection of tiny stories is not through themes and feelings and stuff—though rest assured, they are there in abundance—but through the words themselves. There is such an immutable specificity to each adjective used, to each scene drawn; yet, at the same time, each is equally as dexterous, folding the connotation of the vignette numerous times until it is no longer a piece of tiny fiction, but a small paper lighthouse with 274 steps. Possibly the one in the beautiful I am fond of you: An ode to Bull Shannon, the one that broadcasts .-. and -.-. I wanted to find that plastic walkie talkie I used to have, the one with the Morse code translator at the bottom, and figure out what the lighthouse was signaling to the land. Then again, I didn’t want to; rather, just let my brain re-imagine those pleas. (As of writing this, I still haven’t looked, though there’s an open window lurking beneath this screen with ‘Morse code translator’ in the Google bar, and I kind of like it like that, knowing but never knowing, and that might be the best encapsulation of the collection: ‘It makes everything into nothing.’ [p. 9])
This constant duality of the prose, the everything and the nothing, it’s scaffolded by words overworked and stretched to the point of snapping, words that snap and send bits of dust over the page, that fall and settle on paper and reform as images of Bull Shannon and prophetic songbirds, like in Something smells like rotten poison on fire: An Ode to Bull Shannon. A songbird lands next to the narrator and says, Whatcha doin’? ‘like this whole mess [it involves a knife and forearm and a flap of skin] is invisible. Like he can’t see me raising my arm to my mouth to taste and can’t see the look on my face, the sour and wrong feel of my own blood on my own tongue.’ And they ask the songbird, ‘[why] my own me taste[s] like poison.’ To which the songbird replies, ‘In the movies, they make blood out of corn syrup and flour. And it tastes like candy.’ [p.34]
At once funny (How’s the weather up there: An ode to Bull Shannon) and sad (Me and Theodore dress up like Eskimos while we roast chestnuts on a hotplate) and darkly comforting (We know what we are) these stories stretch dream until it is reality and segue from absurd to startling, all so quickly that you are left with only the memory of a gasp and the image of Bull Shannon dissolving the Huxtable family.
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