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A review by pearloz
Beside Myself by Ashley Farmer
I'm already skeptical of micro-fiction when the stories are cohesive and 'complete', but when they come across as scattered, improv-like nonsense, I'm fully against it. I, in fact, enjoyed some of these entries--the best of them felt like anecdotes/myths from the same small town (for some reason they felt like they were all set at night), but my least favorite of them were word salad, prose-poems:
"I learned to sister. We played water tower. I took the light, it stayed, the mystery, the light letters from Edison with my name on them. We chased a river, we played blue pills, we seemed to flicker the truth, we fused back water. The town got red letters. The light stayed on."
What? I like my fiction mysterious and strange and obscure as much as anything, but some of these vignettes went beyond obfuscation, they were hostile to understanding, and I couldn't connect. Micro-fiction suffers in my retention already because of the sheer number of stories crammed into a book and because their effect is so short term, that by the end of a collection, I have no idea what I've read. This is worsened when I don't like them.
"I learned to sister. We played water tower. I took the light, it stayed, the mystery, the light letters from Edison with my name on them. We chased a river, we played blue pills, we seemed to flicker the truth, we fused back water. The town got red letters. The light stayed on."
What? I like my fiction mysterious and strange and obscure as much as anything, but some of these vignettes went beyond obfuscation, they were hostile to understanding, and I couldn't connect. Micro-fiction suffers in my retention already because of the sheer number of stories crammed into a book and because their effect is so short term, that by the end of a collection, I have no idea what I've read. This is worsened when I don't like them.