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Split Series Volume 1: Hirsch & Pope
Bone Matter by Alexis Pope and This Will Be His Legacy by Aubrey Hirsch from The Lettered Streets Press.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
8 people want to read
About the author
Aubrey Hirsch
10 books64 followersAubrey Hirsch is the author of Graphic Rage: Comics on Gender, Justice, and Life as a Woman in America, and Why We Never Talk About Sugar, a short story collection. Her comics, essays, and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, The Nib, TIME Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in literature and an Individual Artist Award from the Sustainable Arts foundation.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 22, 2021
Aubrey Hirsch's writing packs a punch, even in these super-shorts, though I enjoyed her (longer) short stories in Why We Never Talk About Sugar more thoroughly. That writing was some of the best I've read; these flash fiction pieces are still powerful but not quite as commanding.
Half of this slim volume is the poetry of Alexis Pope. Half is Hirsch's short fictional "counterfactual biographies." I read it all but will only comment on Hirsch's fiction here.
Two factors made me purchase this book. I am attending a writers retreat that asks us to share a work of flash fiction with the group and I realized that I am not really a major reader of flash fiction. I really loved Hirsch's other stories, however, so I thought I might give her a try. This choice was cinched by seeing that one of the "counterfactual biographies" was of Rachel Garrett, captain of the Enterprise-C. This was a stupendous and joyful trigger for me as even the choice of the subject matter is consistent with the fierce tender incisive boldness I came to expect from reading Hirsch's short stories. Anyone who has watched "Yesterday's Enterprise" will appreciate this choice as well.
One strength of Hirsch's work is her exercise of imagination and the range of her curiosities. We get so quickly into and beneath these almost-caricature characters with very few words. Also, the way in which gendered perspective is always keenly rendered but never, to my reading, overpowering. I respect that and it helps the reader to feel empathy with characters warts and all.
Although I was hoping to really love the Rachel Garrett piece, that felt like one of the weaker vignettes collected here. I appreciated most the pieces on Michael Collins, the Apollo astronaut who orbited but did not step foot on the Moon, and on Morrie Rath, a member of the Chicago Black Sox World Series team. There's an elegance and grace to Hirsch's renderings of these people as characters, and a haunting resonant loneliness that flows from their specific circumstances but also feels utterly universal.
I wouldn't recommend this volume out of the blue to any reader, but it's a tidy volume with an intriguing body of work. I do intend to revisit some of these shorts on future reads because of the strength of her writing, and they also made me curious about some of the historical figures I did not recognize by name (Morrie Rath, John Sevier, and Gorgo, Queen of Sparta).
So, while this is not the most amazing reading in the world, it supported a worthwhile Saturday afternoon and provides some provocations on imagination, characterization, and craft.
Half of this slim volume is the poetry of Alexis Pope. Half is Hirsch's short fictional "counterfactual biographies." I read it all but will only comment on Hirsch's fiction here.
Two factors made me purchase this book. I am attending a writers retreat that asks us to share a work of flash fiction with the group and I realized that I am not really a major reader of flash fiction. I really loved Hirsch's other stories, however, so I thought I might give her a try. This choice was cinched by seeing that one of the "counterfactual biographies" was of Rachel Garrett, captain of the Enterprise-C. This was a stupendous and joyful trigger for me as even the choice of the subject matter is consistent with the fierce tender incisive boldness I came to expect from reading Hirsch's short stories. Anyone who has watched "Yesterday's Enterprise" will appreciate this choice as well.
One strength of Hirsch's work is her exercise of imagination and the range of her curiosities. We get so quickly into and beneath these almost-caricature characters with very few words. Also, the way in which gendered perspective is always keenly rendered but never, to my reading, overpowering. I respect that and it helps the reader to feel empathy with characters warts and all.
Although I was hoping to really love the Rachel Garrett piece, that felt like one of the weaker vignettes collected here. I appreciated most the pieces on Michael Collins, the Apollo astronaut who orbited but did not step foot on the Moon, and on Morrie Rath, a member of the Chicago Black Sox World Series team. There's an elegance and grace to Hirsch's renderings of these people as characters, and a haunting resonant loneliness that flows from their specific circumstances but also feels utterly universal.
I wouldn't recommend this volume out of the blue to any reader, but it's a tidy volume with an intriguing body of work. I do intend to revisit some of these shorts on future reads because of the strength of her writing, and they also made me curious about some of the historical figures I did not recognize by name (Morrie Rath, John Sevier, and Gorgo, Queen of Sparta).
So, while this is not the most amazing reading in the world, it supported a worthwhile Saturday afternoon and provides some provocations on imagination, characterization, and craft.
December 25, 2022
Interesting concept, well realized.
Worth the read. There are some real standouts here.
I particularly loved the Michael Collins piece.
Worth the read. There are some real standouts here.
I particularly loved the Michael Collins piece.
April 28, 2014
A perfect balance of prose & poems in one of the coolest book design concepts I've seen in a while. Two chapbook-length works from separate authors come together to make one split, one read from the front "right-side-up" and one from the back "up-side-down," but perfect bound as a pair and given the publishing quality each deserves. Pope's poem's reach deep into your bones before digging around while Hirsch's "counterfactual biographies" are perfect-pitch remixes of the past, adding bass-y undercurrents to historic figures' tales. I want these pieces on vinyl so I can be constantly flipping from side A to side B and back again. I'm not sure I'd ever get tired.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews