They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks [Paperback] [2011] (Author) Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace, Mary Miller

by Elizabeth J. Colen

Fiction. THEY COULD NO LONGER CONTAIN THEMSELVES contains--but just barely--five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dropped toddlers, attempted drownings, juvenile promiscuity, road trips, and inappropriate therapy sessions compose the multi-voiced family portrait in Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake by Elizabeth J. Colen. Yoga stalkers, guns and gold, babies with iron stomachs, drunkards with t-shirt cannons, and warlocks are the stuff of Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever by John Jodzio. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Evan's House and the Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington. Leukemia, meteorites, Wal-Mart, bocce ball, Charlie Brown's clinical depression, the language of talking crows and of Che Guevara's omelets fill the eggs in How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace. And smallstories about pretty girls who sit quietly and behave themselves (or not) populate the pages of Paper and Tassels by Mary Miller.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories

Unknown Binding

First published May 18, 2011

Reviews

[Mel Bosworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeah, if you like reading, words, variety, if you like books, pages, drama, humor, if you like to be a person, with hair, hands, eyes and such, if you like to be, if you are, I mean, then you need to pick up Rose Metal Press’s They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. It’s safe to say it’s pretty awesome.

This collection of five flash chapbooks from five different authors (the four finalists from the fourth short short chapbook contest and the winner from the third) is as inspiring as it is moving, sad, funny, challenging. It’s basically everything you’d ever want from the written word, and it comes in such a damn tight package that, well, it’s wonderful.

To me, being good at brevity in literature is like being good at reducing fractions in math. At least to a point. I don’t want that to come off as being too reductive (ha ha) because I know, from a literary standpoint, it takes more than just practice and patience; it takes natural talent as well, and there’s an abundance of all these qualities throughout this book.

However, I don’t want to just sit here and heap on the praise (although it’ll be tricky to do otherwise) so what I’ll do is give you—in the spirit of brevity—some short thoughts about each of the authors along with some short snippets from their respective work.

We’ll begin at the beginning with John Jodzio’s collection Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever. There’s a great playfulness in these stories, lots of twists, lots of random and weird and bizarre. Lots of great opening hooks, too. Jodzio, like all of the writers in this collection, is a master with the fishing pole. One or two lines in and the hook is set deep in the flesh of our cheek, my friends. We’re let go when they’re good and ready to let us go, and that’s okay because the ride is absolutely thrilling.

From Jodzio’s Octane:

“I’m testing pump octane at a Shell Station on St. Cloud when a warlock casts a spell over me. He’s got a black goatee and his ponytail is pulled back into a green scrunchie. He comes out of the station munching on a fruit pie and then he gives me a smile and a little nod. That’s all it takes. I suddenly feel compelled to follow him wherever he goes.”

Mary Miller’s collection Paper And Tassels comes next, and in my notebook I see the words beautiful, hard, and real, and these three words are still ringing true to me. Miller’s stories have a great bite to them, they’re filled with these painful little truths that are simply shocking in their openness. They sit right on the page, daring you to look at them. Her writing is, in my mind, consistently brilliant.

From Miller’s Misled:

“This boy is with you now. He stands behind you with a pair of scissors and a comb because the world you live in has a high turnover rate, like the chain restaurant along the highway where you wait tables for extra money. People just stop showing up. New people are hired on the spot.”

Elizabeth J. Colen’s collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake draws out the sometimes pain of nostalgia and the often dangerous curiosity of precocious children. The collection itself is bisected, giving us equal parts adult mourning and coming-of-age crushes. It’s powerful, funny, and sad.

From Colen’s Bruising:

“Some people burn their lover’s letters when their hearts get broken. Or burn them years later when they’ve finally gotten over everything. I drown mine. Put them in the tub with me once the water has lost its heat, but before it grows too cold. As my fingers wilt and the bath bubbles level out into nothing but honey-scented film that greases the tub walls, I put my book or magazine down and pick up a letter I want to kill.”

Evan’s House And The Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington focuses on a young man’s stress in the face of peer pressure and the temptation of conformity, his explorations of love, and all of the shame and rage that comes with these things. Yelvington’s work here is tender and relentless, but also clever and humorous. He strikes an unexpected balance that gives the words endless appeal.

From Yelvington’s Housekeeping:

“The note he wrote us said, “I think I’m gay.” Randall, whose own son is ten years older than Evan and lives with his partner in Brooklyn, pumped his fists and said, “Yes! I have two gay sons!” I glared, pursed my lips and said, “That’s not what this note says.”

Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the final collection in the book and the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, wears its crown well. It’s funny, sad, surprising, inventive, playful, etc., and it reminds us that it’s okay to relax, it’s okay to laugh, it’s okay to not be so damn serious all the time. And these are nothing if not welcome reminders.

From Lovelace’s Endings:

“A teenage girl catches an amazingly large fish. She pauses, allowing herself to gaze in wonder. It has a row of bent hooks and five broken leaders in its mouth. It has a history. The girl isn’t really a girl. She only plays one online. She is actually a grown man who works in a chemical company that combines corn husks with hydrochloric acid to create a polymer used in cruise missiles.”

Do yourself a favor and get this book.

Also, it probably wouldn’t hurt to pick up the winner of Rose Metal’s fourth annual short short chapbook contest, We Know What We Are by Mary Hamilton.

Get going.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

How much ass does John Jodzio kick? Quite a lot, and his work launches this excellent collection in impressive fashion. More proof that Jodzio is one of the best (and most underappreciated) writers of short fiction out there. The rest of the collection is pretty stellar too (Rose Metal definitely has a keen eye for talent). Mary Miller is fantastic. Elizabeth Colen's voice is seductive and full of shadows. Sean Lovelace is a warm headtrip. Tim Jones-Yelvington's stories blew me away in their sneaky, bittersweet, sometimes nervous sentences. Sorry it took me so long to finally read it.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I already knew that I was going to love Elizabeth Colen's work in this collection of five flash fiction chapbooks. What I didn't expect was that I would love each and every one of the other four just as much. The stories are funny, heartbreaking, strange, strangely uplifting, thought-provoking, smart, sharply-toothed, and toothsome. I enjoyed every page.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gah. I love flash fiction; that "less is more" approach.

In this, a collection of five flash chapbooks, the reader gets even more of "less."

And more less means you get even more!

Or something like that...

[T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colen and Jones-Yelvington were the most compelling for me. The book overall is between a 4-5 for me. I will use this down the road for courses in fiction writing. All of the chapbooks are very strong.

[J. Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy short story collections because they let me pick up and stop at will. This was such a great concept and a great collection of flash pieces. Well done Rose Metal, well done.

[Paige Lanham · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mostly loved this for Sean Lovelace's section. Everything comes back to crows, how amazing is that?

[Melina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Jones-Yelvington was my favorite writer in this collection.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

As seen in Gently Read Literature, Summer 2012

http://gentlyread.wordpress.com/


Masters of Subtext

Kelly Lydick on They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks.



David Sedaris once said that a good short story “…would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”
To master the art of the short story is to master a palette of details and display them appropriately, to see the scope of life as a metaphor for itself, to view a single event as a broader representation of what it means to be human, to participate in this thing that we all share, that we call “life.”
And while a short story can feasibly hold within itself characters who travel from succinct beginning, to middle, to end, a flash fiction piece shrinks time. Flash fiction hangs suspended between a prose poem and a short story, and with adeptness and precision, authors must carefully choose the details they decide to display to readers and create what is structured as “story,” making the use of subtext more particular than in other storytelling forms.
The authors represented in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves each in their unique ways—in their unique voices—create and sustain these short bodies of thematic works, and, collected together as “Five Flash Chapbooks” provide readers with a variety of characters and images upon which to ponder the deeper meanings of human relationship and interaction.
Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever by John Jodzio begins the collection with a newlywed couple learning to speak Spanish, and includes pieces about parents whose baby swallowed a ninja star, a yoga teacher and her student, and a warlock who casts a spell, among others.
“My First Wife,” a brief picture of a married couple with communication issues, begins with bittersweet detail.
I’d found some walkie-talkies in the dumpster, the main, male character says, and you ran outside to see if they worked. I sat at the kitchen table and listened as you told me that you thought you heard “truckers in between the static of us.”
Jodzio symbolically depicts a couple who talk to one another, but never seem to really “hear” one another, his phrase, “the static of us” indicating that from the beginning of the piece, the couple’s relationship is strained. Divorce is never mentioned in the brief story, but only indicated by the title, referencing the “first” wife.
The couple then purchases a rock polisher, indicative of the attempt to smooth the relationship—not any rocks in particular—and make it work.
Still, you once had told me that you adored polished agates like the ones you saw in the bins at the curiosity shoppes. You told me that you liked the idea of holding a piece of rough earth in your hand and then hours later seeing it buffed to a high shine.
Jodzio’s narrator continues, showing the human fragility of those who try to make wrong relationships right. And while the readers know from the beginning the outcome of the couple’s marriage, it’s never directly stated. The piece concludes with the description of the rock polisher:
Only when we started it up did we know. It was incredible, that sound. It was like there was an airplane passing right over the top of us, swallowing up everything we said. I kept telling you to switch it off, but you could not even hear me. Everything that came out of my mouth sounded loud and hissing.

Mary Miller’s collection Paper and Tassels continues Jodzio’s theme of relationships, with flash fiction pieces depicting romantic couples, a choir teacher, a dish washer and an artist. Her short “Patterns” depicts the romantic relationship of a couple in which neither party is satisfied.
He takes off his glasses to look at me. The lenses are scratched. They came that way, he accepted them.
Miller chooses the detail of the glasses to indicate to readers that the male partner is indifferent—not about the glasses—but about the partnership. The piece continues, describing a mundane dinner date, during which the man does not pay for the meal, and appears to flirt with the waitress. The female main character attempts to protest, and the man makes excuses for his behavior.
Despite that the female main character is unsatisfied with the relationship, she chooses not to dissolve the partnership. Upon returning home for the evening, the “pattern” repeats, leaving the reader with the impression that the dynamic is this couple’s habitual style of interaction.
At the place we call home, I ask him to leave, she says. He agrees easily, so I talk him into staying.
In these brief two sentences, Miller portrays the emotional logic of this couple, more unwilling to be alone than willing to endure their dissatisfaction.

Elizabeth J. Colen’s collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake gives readers yet another glimpse of relationship dynamics through the experiences of a mother, a daughter, a group of neighborhood ladies, a young woman mesmerized by the beach, and a widow.
Her piece “Shoulder” takes readers on a road trip with a mother who is dying of cancer, and has yet to tell her daughter. Colen alludes to the terrible news through her portrayal of the details in the setting as seen through the car window as they drive by nameless American towns.
We get to the next town and the next town. Wisteria covers everything, vines like cancer over everything, houses, trees, fences, climbing up clotheslines, telephone poles. Three parked cars in three yards in a row even had vines growing over.
Cancer is mentioned again after a brief verbal spat between the mother and her daughter, Evie, while the deadly disease is avoided in direct conversation.
Wisteria blooming with visible tumors, white and purple, everywhere. Everywhere. The signs are painted perfectly by the side of the road. The houses are painted perfectly. Impeccable signs by the side of the road. Signs for everything.
And then, when the “perfect” opportunity presents itself, the mother chooses not to tell her daughter the news of her illness.
Evie has cracked her window.
“God I’m dying in here.”
So am I, I want to tell her. So am I…I say nothing and roll through the next three stops. The heat sleeps, shimmer on the pavement, shimmer on the hood of the car.
Instead, the mother focuses on the present moment, the landscape, the minutia outside the window, never revealing to her daughter that her illness is terminal.

Evan’s House and Other Boys Who Live There by Tim Jones-Yelvington is the third chapbook featured in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.
“House: Boy Who is Not a Boy, but Evan’s House,” the first selection, sets the tone for chapbook, utilizing the point of view of the house as the narrator. The selections continue with narratives spun from the other boy characters, including “Boy Who Makes His Friends,” “Boy Who Wants to Paint His Face,” and “Boy Who Steals Soda” among others.
“Painted Faces: Boy Who Wants to Paint His Face” takes place in a rural mall, offering a conversation between the narrator and another boy named Randy.
“If somebody gave you a hundred dollars, how would you use it?” Randy says. We’re at the Clareborne County Mall. We’re celebrating Randy’s twelfth birthday. “Want to know how I’d use it?” he says. “Hookers!”
The narrator’s answer is quite different. As the two boys are standing near the face-painting booth, the narrator thinks he would like to spend the money painting his face to look like a lion—not on hookers. But out of fear that Randy might make fun of him if he told the truth, the narrator simply replies: “Me, too,” I say. “Definitely hookers.”
Jones-Yelvington’s skill in creating this scene describes to readers, indirectly, the peer pressure that exists between these two boys. In this and in the other pieces in Evan’s House and Other Boys Who Live There, the theme of peer pressure, suggestion, and withholding are also present. Jones-Yelvington crafts these related stories, weaving them together like a family of related characters, all seeking the same thing: love and approval.

Lastly, Sean Lovelace’s flash fiction collection, How Some People Like Their Eggs, concludes the anthology with excerpts from Charlie Brown’s diary, the story of a bocce ball player, and a friend supporting another friend through Leukemia.
The piece “How Some People Like Their Eggs” takes inventory of how famous (and infamous) people like their eggs. Yogi Berra, General Patton, Andy Warhol, Bonnie Parker, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Anne Sexton, Robert Capa, Che Guevara, Billie Holiday, Cher, Buzz Aldren, Howard Hughes, and Thelonious Monk round out the cast of characters.
By describing the mundane task of making eggs, Lovelace reveals the irony of the select piece of information that one can know about another.
Billie Holiday:
Served Sunny Side Up, inverted. Like two dreams dropped from a great height. Big and round and shiny and flat. Served with a glass of rusty tap water. Served fourteen minutes after cooking. While cooling. While cool.

It appears that a deeper sense of the character is being portrayed, at that the form may also follow the character’s personal style, but the passages indirectly question what is known about these public people.
Howard Hughes:
Steam-basted. In an autoclave.

Thelonious Monk:
No human being knows how Thelonious Monk likes his eggs.

While these descriptions appear to reveal something intimate about these characters, they also reiterate that the general public may think they have an idea about what these celebrities are like—but don’t really know—and never will. Lovelace challenges the reader’s perception of these famous personalities, while seeming to reveal what is already known. Indirectly, he also addresses the idea of relationship, as the other authors in this collection have done. The flash fiction begs the reader to ponder the unstated question: If you know how someone likes their eggs, does that mean you really know that person?

The authors featured in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves write their stories as Sedaris suggests a story should—change the reader. The work of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace become for the reader metaphors for the common situations that many may, at some point or another, face, bringing to light the ineffability of existence. With vibrancy and poignancy, these authors say what it is they want to say, quickly and adeptly, without ever actually having to say it.

[Ak. · Rating 5 out of 5]

(here is my review, originally published here: http://flashfiction.net/2011/05/chapb...)

There is a lesson in the truth of advertising here, “here” being the wind-swept cover of a book proclaiming of its insides, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. Rose Metal Press’s new collection of five flash chapbooks more than keeps its promise.

The collection includes Rose Metal Press’s 2009 Third Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest winner Sean Lovelace’s “How Some People Like Their Eggs”; Elizabeth J. Colen’s “Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake”; John Jodzio’s “Do Not Touch Me Now Not Ever”; Tim Jones-Yelvington’s “Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There”; and Mary Miller’s “Paper and Tassels.”

John Jodzio opens the collection with back-to-back staccato pieces. Of those two, “Inventory” is deliciously absurd, complemented by the author’s great humor: “Game fucking on,” remarks a father in a marriage counseling session after his baby has swallowed his wristwatch, along with a pair of nail clippers, a button, and a ninja star. The pace is quick, but Jodzio’s great parlor trick is the slow burn at the end, when a couple comes to realize their life has been reduced to a notebook with an inventory of what exists and what does not. He crosses into deeper territory with stories that hurt so good, like “Shoo Shoo,” “Guns and Gold,” and “Vessels,” all three of which tie together thematically as Jodzio explores the fumbled and often heart-wrenching relationships between parents and children.

Love and sex and all of its manifestations at times whimper, at times scream, from the pages of Mary Miller’s “Paper and Tassels.” There is blood, bruising, disconnect, desperation and, most of all, longing. Sad longing, mostly, but often tempered with a dangerous kind of power that one human can exact over another. Miller harnesses that power in “Angel,” the story of a woman who lives in a world that she’s always on the verge of leaving, and the man who wants to ground her with his gaze: “He watches me because I won’t be around for long. He watches me because I’m the consistency of vapor.” A few stories, like “Love,” “Diagnosis” and “Paper and Tassels,” teeter on the side of pretty prose poetry, but take a moment to unspool Miller’s threads and you’ll find well-etched cores of sadness, pockets of isolation, and people using people. Miller’s women are fierce women.

“Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake” is the devastating chronicle of a mother and daughter’s failed relationship. Colen splits it into two sections, “Until She Comes Looking” and “Anything You Can Do.” For the most part, “Looking” invokes the daughter’s point of view; “Do” takes on the role of the mother. The story arc that spills out between the two of them puddles into the vicious, conflicting space that stands between them, and neither woman bothers to clean up the mess. They each sidestep it, and each other. As distant as the mother and daughter seem to be, the things they do to fill their empty places are similar. They confuse healing with sex. They self-loathe. They manipulate men. In this nonlinear, multi-voiced chapbook, mothers die, babies are neglected, daughters stumble through Mexico in a sex- and drugs-drenched daze, and, most of all, people lie, because the truth is too heavy to bear.

The collection’s most palpable sense of want, of stifled desire, of lightning-quick loneliness lives under the roof of Tim Jones-Yelvington’s “Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There.” Building off of its neighbor, the house that Colen built, Jones-Yelvington, too, holds tight to a narrative arc between a few select characters and gradually lets it go, allowing the reader to watch a covetous character go from child to adult. His characters struggle with wanting so badly that they drive others away, like in “To Be A Friend Is To Make A Friend,” in which a boy struggles with childhood relationships; and in “Slime Me,” in which young Abner is commandeered by an urgent, unforgiving fetish. The characters are mostly young, which is a pitch-perfect choice because of children’s inherent inability to recognize boundaries. They’re also mostly boys and men acclimating to their homosexuality. These men are throbbing, pulsing, feverish, but there are also mothers who miss their children, daughters who get kicked out of their homes, a dominatrix, and a hilarious commentary on a certain Republican family that lives in Alaska.

The last section of the book, the pimp slot, goes to Sean Lovelace. He meddles with pop culture icons, documenting Charlie Brown’s diary. In Lovelace’s world, by the year 2000, Brown has gained 20 pounds, his shirt no longer fits. He can’t get out of his bed. In “A Sigh is Just A Sigh,” seductress Ingrid Bergman tempts and teases and Humphrey Bogart is offered Pop-Tarts in a stranger’s kitchen. His twisted realities are equal parts light and dark. His flashes seem to follow no ordinary trajectory; styles of writing blend in each piece, be it narrative arcs, small blurbs, or prose that breaks down into witty, quick-hit lists. Lovelace proves there’s more than one way to prepare an egg; even more so, he proves that flash is an ever-evolving dish that, in the right author’s kitchen, can be cooked up each time more fresh and interesting than the last.

The overall wonder of this plump little gem is that there is no jockeying for space, no jostling of elbows, no stepping on toes. Yes, five authors have colored these pages with volumes of desire, longing, humor, loneliness, heartache, wit and desperation; and yes, the stories are often larger than the page, larger than the space allotted in our chests to breathe them in, but. Each individual voice is heard. Each story is a concrete, complete thing that connects with the others in the most honest and organic way. There is no point where the smoke of one story shapes itself lazily into the haze of another. These five voices are distinct, definitive, and each story smarts with such pin-prick execution you’ll be surprised not to find blood on the page.

[Deborah Poe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Colen and Jones-Yelvington were the most compelling for me. The book overall is between a 4-5 for me. I will use this down the road for courses in fiction writing. All of the chapbooks are very strong.

[Allison Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love flash collections and these are all fantastic. I like getting bundles of books so you don’t have to stop when you finish one book—just continue on to the next amazing collection.

[Robert Morgan Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth the price for Jodzio and Sean Lovelace alone. An indispensable compendium for the serious flash fiction scholar/writer/reader.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this mainly to read Sean Lovelace's chapbook, and I was not disappointed -- Lovelace is fantastic, easily one of the most skilled flash writers around. I was also pleasantly surprised at the quality of the other writers; John Jodzio and Mary Miller, in particular, were great. All in all, this book is well worth the money.

[Fern · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm learning about what exactly flash fiction and chapbooks are all about. I enjoyed reading these short, very rhythmic, sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny, sometimes both, stories.
Highly recommended. Best to read a chapbook in one sitting to get its full effect.

[Gina · Rating 5 out of 5]

tim jones-yelvington writes life- specifically queer life, but also just life- the way i like to read it- humane, weird, sad, achingly loving, determined and unafraid in spite of great fears. perfect.

[Joey Pizzolato · Rating 5 out of 5]

The pilar of the flash fiction genre. Read my full review on Curbside Splendor Press' website: http://inc.www.curbsidesplendor.com/c...

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite the variety of quick reads, I had never read any of these six authors before. None are bad. My favorite is Sean Lovelace, born to write.

[Chelsea Bartlett · Rating 3 out of 5]

12/16/15