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Brooklyn Rail review of Emily Ate the Wind Peter Conners’s novella Emily Ate the Wind unfolds as a textured series of 2-3 page soundbursts that populate and interview the far-reaching ghost of America’s everytown bar. It’s a story of bad luck and unseen brinks, lived by loose circles of friends that bond and unbond as strangely as real people. They teach school, sell real estate, cut lawns, purchase cocaine, and frequent a bar called The Bar. And so their stories tend toward the tragic. But in Conners’s hands tragedy is never a means or an end. His project here is more varied and ambitious; each short prose piece seems to speak in its own language, each gives a view of its subject as seen from blindingly close range, and since many of the stories read at first as departures from the main narrative, the expanding implications revealed on a subsequent pass form a wide wholeness that books twice its length rarely achieve. We begin in a state of fading lucidity, in the thoughts of Dan, a The Bar patron lying beaten and bleeding in the establishment’s parking lot. We meet the rest of the cast, (a pair of buddies, a grandfather, a set of girlfriends, a toddler, among others,) in quick succession. As stories, the pieces live or die on voice, and for much of the book the rise and fall of action equals the rise and fall of Conners’s sentences themselves. There is something hyperstylized and cryptic about our main narrator that contrasts with the reporterly forthrightness in the various departing pieces. Sometimes the contrast seems as important as the content; for most of the novella the story doesn’t so much progress as it does grow new arms and legs, and the book’s architecture neatly isolates both reader and character from a bigger picture. Texture and movement take over. By the final scenes, a unifying bang seems unlikely. But Conners’s ending transforms the story with clarity and force, and we are thrust back to page one with reaffirmed respect for the inevitable. Emily Ate the Wind offers something rare. Its confidence of vision, rooted early in Conners’s stance as poet and stylist, earns an acceptant reading. Its precise attention to accent and moment make it a modern period piece of sorts, and despite the fact that its cleverness sometimes feels written in, it has a physical authenticity that realist writers will envy. And it satisfies the story test. These heroes find themselves suddenly and always at a loss. Because they act and are acted upon there is harbor in each for warring forms of guilt, chance, and ignorance. They know very little about each other. They know about as much as we do about crime or wind or what to do. |
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A new review of Emily Ate the Wind published in Web Del Sol Review of Books: Eating Up All That is Human and Divine: Some Notes on Peter Conners’ Emily Ate the Wind by Doug Martin _____________ Peter Conners, Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008) Set in New York in late fall or early winter, Peter Conners’ Emily Ate the Wind centers around The Bar. In the first scene, we find Dan, a Bar regular, beaten and dying in the bar’s parking lot. Then, through stories, sketches, question and answers, prose poems, short newspaper articles, break-up letters from a lover, and vignettes, Conners, in the following chapters, takes us into the tragic lives of a group of people who frequent The Bar. Yet, amidst all the misfortune, moments of humor and transcendentalism surface, and Conners’ soundscapes more than win over the reader for 110 pages. Read complete review here: http://wdsreviewofbooks.webdelsol.com/Conners.html |
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