Book Review: Stefanescu, Ulrich, Zambrano

by Scott Neuffer

Someone gave me an Amazon gift card for Christmas, and I spent it on books. I’m sorry. Amazon is a monster, but if I didn’t spend it on books, I would’ve blown it on Nintendo 64 games, and then I wouldn’t be reading at all.

The books I got were written by trampset contributors, all collected works of short fiction, all written by ingenious women….

Every Mask I Tried On by Alina Stefanescu, Brighthorse Books, 2018

This story collection bristles with restless intellectual and poetic energy, the kind of energy necessary not only to reimagine domestic life in America — where the majority of stories takes place — but the short story itself. Stefanescu, a poet, is incredibly smart; she might be the smartest person I know. These stories have an intellectual rigor that’s not easy to find in contemporary lit. But they aren’t stiff. Stefanescu is also a gifted lyricist. This uncanny collection welds her fierce intellect to her unbelievable descriptive powers in what is a unique and dynamic voice — hilarious and devastating in the same breath. Many of the pieces are satirical riffs on American life. A Romanian immigrant, Stefanescu aims her sharp eyes at our worst foibles, particularly the stupidities of American men. But these aren’t caricatures. They’re deep and prying stories that pose tough questions about identity and belonging. At their moral center stirs the voice of a woman narrator trying to survive, trying to make sense of experience. This voice blisters with honesty. It finds the social and political realities beneath the masks we wear: “No matter how far you run, Reader, the slow, shrill dark will gobble you up. Inside the belly of the whale or the wolf, this is as safe as it gets. To be swallowed by a beast…Learn to speak between breaths you share with a monster.”

Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich, Okay Donkey Press, 2019

Cathy Ulrich is a master of metapulp, which is a term I just made up. What I mean is she consciously plays with the clichés of American crime and horror stories as they relate to female victims. Cumulatively, by focusing on the lives of victims, these flash pieces offer a critique of cultural tropes that is so sly, so finely wrought in detail, that you might miss it if you blink. But it’s there — social commentary like a buried heartbeat, binding these disparate characters together. The language is knife-sharp but also evocative. The stories are narrated in the second person as if to summon the ghosts they describe. And the syntactical rhythms of Ulrich’s sentences — the parallelism and repetition of words — play like eerie music for an uncommonly powerful effect. These stories linger like a sad song: “You will be the quiet of the highway before a semi rumbles through, you will be the pavement cracked with dandelion sprout. You will be the window at your sister’s place that never quite closes, the whistle-hiss of wind at night.”

Death, Desire, and Other Destinations by Tara Isabel Zambrano, Okay Donkey Press, 2020

Dazzling. An utterly beautiful story collection mining the spaces between longing and death. Featuring mostly women narrators, these stories range from the real and social, as observed on Planet Earth, to the fantastic and cosmic. Zambrano is an immigrant from India, now an engineer in the U.S., and she brings a keen sense of wonder to the page. Her prose is erotically driven, kaleidoscopic, offering a montage of the sensuous and surreal that culminates in something like rapture — moments of pure poetry. Reading this collection is like swimming inside a rainbow, clutching color for it only to change in your hand. In her glowing words, Zambrano has captured the magic and tragedy of life: “the purple goodbye of the day, the silent spaces between the chirps.”

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Scott Neuffer is editor of trampset.