Math for the Self-Crippling

Review

Preparing for my small press club this past week, I stood around and scanned titles. A person came up and picked this off the turning rack and recommended it. “It’s tiny!” I said, referring not only to the thickness but the form factor, which reminds me a bit of the Archipelago books. The person that handed me the book turned out to be the author.

It is probably fair to say I bought the book 33% out of a sense of social obligation interior to myself (the same voice in my head that tells me I can’t walk into a store and then leave without buying something), and 67% out of curiosity. The back flap notes that it is the winner of the 2020 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition, and chapbooks are something I’ve been curious about without having ever read.

I packed the book in a duffle and after being woken up around 2am in a townhouse in Cleveland, Ohio, I read the thing cover to cover. I can say free of any influence that I really liked the writing. The stories are sometimes one page long, at most probably 3 pages. They are connected through a shared narrator, though this connection seems mostly background. Each story is basically self-contained. I found myself wondering about the inspirations for the stories, how autobiographical they might be. Some of them struck me as a little too relatable for comfort, which I liked in an odd way. It is probably not surprising that I liked the more melancholy of the writings, given my moods and what I tend to try and write.

I think a lot about how memories work and how easy it is to become trapped in memory and rumination, how they can twist and turn in your head. Many of these stories felt like they had the velvet edges of memory, and I found that, if not comfortable, familiar.

I really enjoyed this! I ordered the author’s novel a few minutes after I put this down and look forward to reading it.

Notes

• p24 - Regret is a cliff far from any office of help.
• p26 - I scanned the sparse crowd for your flyaway black hair, that outward gait of yours, but everyone’s legs excluded me, turned inward in their own monogamy.
  • TB: What I like about this sentence is the depth of familiarity it communicates. It is a certain level of care and attention that begins to notice how someone stands, how they walk, and how they hold themselves, and to see those things from a far distance in a crowd and feel the turning of self in recognition.
• p29 - You wonder if your ex misses you, if he saved the birthday cards you penned him, and if so, which ones.