Jackalope

by Denise Low

Fiction. Native American Studies. Jackalope in Denise Low's trickster stories is a 21st century figure as real as Bigfoot. Part antelope and part rabbit, this denizen of the grasslands has a Twitter account and a trusty road car. He loves Native American tales as well as Old West adventures. Jack's social life includes encounters with Roswell aliens, Jayhawks, and Chupacabra (Goat Sucker). Bawdy humor is Jackalope's lifeblood, so join Jack as he (or sometimes she) savors urban legends and juniper- based martinis.

"In JACKALOPE, the mythic gender- bending figure, Jaq/Jack, takes us along on a magical mystery tour where s/he meets up with other trickster- cryptids. Jaq/Jack leaps out of the two-dimensional entrapment of postcards to claim his/her own spaces between worlds. One wonders why Jackalope has had to wait so long to have a say."—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Director of The Red Earth MFA

"JACKALOPE recounts the seriocomic encounters of a Native American trickster who travels through a world that's 'part factual and part mythological, just like everything else.' In the 'intergender' Jackalope/Jaqalope Kelley's picaresque sojourns in bars (mostly), truck stops, and galleries, history meets tall tale, dream and vision worry the mundane, and humor functions as a salve for wounds of the long-oppressed. Here is a multi- faceted and incisive look at America from the viewpoint of its indigenous people and spirits."—William Trowbridge, Missouri Poet Laureate

"JACKALOPE is a perfect blend of stories, poetry, and strangeness. Denise Low has created a collection that is simultaneously myth and not-myth, a shining delight."—Kij Johnson, Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards winner

"Trickster takes center stage in Denise Low's JACKALOPE, a collection of prose and poetry recounting the adventures of its title character, Jackalope Kelley. This anthropomorphic animal is the cryptid on postcards you see at gas stations across the American Midwest—a rabbit with two iconic pronghorn antlers. Jackalope Kelley shifts between male and female Jack when he's a man, Jaq when she's a woman. He drinks a gin and tonic in a Twitter bar. She passes through Seattle, Santa Fe, Minneapolis, Colorado, and Roswell, among other places. He vomits when he sees the head of one of his ancestors mounted above the door in a Wyoming bar. And she searches for a gynecologist—or does he need a urologist? All of these scenes give the book a playful feel, but there's also plenty of time for reflection. In quieter moments, Jackalope tries to explain his complicated heritage to others. ... This merging of shape-shifting identities with shape-shifting trickster narratives is no accident. The language of the book is steeped in the Native American mythologies and vocabularies that Low understands so well."—Ben Pfeiffer, Interviews Editor, The Rumpus

Genres: Short Stories

152 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Lindsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fiction, flash fiction and poetry in Denise Low’s new book Jackalope, not only display the poet’s alliterative sounds, ideas, and imagery, they recount a story about a Midwestern-Western archetype, Jackalope Lamat Kelley, a trickster akin to rabbit and coyote archetypes. According to Low, jackalopes are “jackrabbit-antelope hybrids”—or rabbits with “pronghorns or deer antlers” found on postcards in gas stations throughout the Midwest and West. Although the jackalope legend has been circulating western states since the 1800s, Low’s jackalope echoes current cultural trends, especially because jackalopes “can manifest as male or female, through a rare physiological process.”

Low titles all forty pieces—some poetry, some paragraph-long prose poems, but primarily fiction scenes running between two and nine pages—separately. Indeed, the book may be read in the same manner as a poetry collection, where the reader stops to ponder over a poem or a section before moving on. Each piece, like a poem, is self-contained. Nevertheless, the language and rhythms form fibers connecting the narrative. Often emulating Native American chants, Low’s rhythmic language propels the audience from line-to-line in the shorter pieces; whereas recurring imagery and dialogue transport readers from scene-to-scene in the longer works.
This well-planned and subtle repetition of allusions and words creates a flow that carries the reader not only through the sections but through time and space—to the world of visionary legends back to contemporary bars. The book carries readers to that space where wonder, dreams, and psychological reality intersect, where the search for the spiritual begins and ends—yet continues in the endless cycle of life.
Low opens the book with “Jackalope Songs,” a prose poem that introduces us to the legend. Next, she moves to the poem, “Subliminal Rabbit,” which not only reveals the persona’s connection to Jackalope, but with the word, “subliminal,” hints that this poem exposes Jackalope’s Anima (psychiatrist Carl G. Jung’s term for the female part of a male’s psyche). Low names Jack’s Anima, “Jaq,” and she appears as the main character in nine of the forty pieces. Low links this female side of the Jackalope character primarily with history, art history, (including the personal history of a memoir), gyno-urologists, and an expanded consciousness.
Jaq first appears in the fourth section, “Jackalope Walks into a Silver City Saloon.” (According to many cultures, “silver” is associated with the female, “gold” with the male.) There, she encounters Coyote via a flirtation with a bartender, Goyakla. She perceives the man would fit into a photograph of Geronimo and speculates, “[t]his man Goyakla, could have walked out of that scene. Both wear faded red shirts, bandanas, and cotton trousers” (20). Later, when she leaves, she spots his “knee-high buckskin boots” by the door and “understands. Coyote can appear whenever he chooses. He can pick anyone he wants” (22).

Later, in “Jackalope Walks into a Roswell Bar,” Low leads us through the intergender transition:
Her testosterone surges as well as adrenaline, and she begins to
shift into masculine mode. So much for the motel clerk—he will not be
interested in an edgy guy-jackalope who only vaguely resembles the flirty
girl Jaq of just a few hours ago. Jaq feels electric energy travel from her
head to her toes. She waits a moment.
She, or rather he, moves warily past the herders as they laugh
uproariously and clink bottles. She keeps her gait smooth and natural.
The dogs stare hostilely but do not move. They are working animals,
trained to follow commands. But also mean as diablos (36).

In “Jackalope Walks into a Peyote Meeting,” Jackalope’s soft Anima side surfaces
when Jaw participates in the Native American Church services for her deceased “Auntie.” Lasting several days, the services include partaking in peyote to reach a spiritual consciousness. Jaq quietly meditates on her aunt, and the drug carries her to the spiritual world that sends her “signs.”
In the night she awakens and goes by the fire to pray. She
watches embers until wind blows a spray of sparks into the air.
They keep rising until they arrange themselves in the sky as a
constellation—Rabbit. This is a good sign (74).

Jackalopes themselves link the rabbit form to the female form of the species. For example, in “Jackalope Walks into a Flash Bar,” Jack encounters an antelope, who may be his father. That character also reveals how the species began. After Jack compliments the antelope on his rack of horns, he replies that he “might have son and daughters about [Jack’s] age, from a relationship with a beautiful rabbit” (101).
“Really?” asks Jack. He always wanted to meet his father. His
pulse quickens. No way to tell for sure without a DNA test, but who
knows? He has had so many questions all these years, but he does not
want to seem too eager. “So what led you to mate with a rabbit, anyway?”
He starts with a basic question.
The buck smiles and then grows serious. “You have to understand
how things were back then, before you were born. We were hunted almost
to extinction” (101-102).

Although Low remains sensitive to the concerns of the intergender species, she also douses the situation with humor in a playful, tongue-in-cheek tone. Nevertheless, it remains edgy humor with serious undertones. Along with using satire in scenes about gender and bureaucracy, such as “Jackalope Walks into a Gyno-Urologist’s Office,” when Jaq is confronted with a packet of questionnaires, Low also employs a zany comic tone when Jack encounters University of Kansas mathematician and poet Judith Roitman. She reflects “One of his favorite poets, Judith Roitman, writes about this [alien species]” (37). Then, aliens return for her. “As the room shakes harder, Judy takes Jack’s arm. . . .Out the north window, light flares. Jack feels the woman’s hand slip out of his grasp” (43).
In a similar vein, Jack shares “Indian humor” with Native Americans in a Santa Fe bar, and later, he “Walks into a Sherman Alexie Narrative,” where he meets Lyman, an Alexie character. Low’s lines often allude to Alexie’s Smoke Signals:
“It must be a good day to be Indigenous. That was close, enit?”
asks Lyman. A renewed stream of traffic blurs by. “Looks like we have
another wait, enit?”
“Yes,” agrees Jack. He brushes gravel off the bottoms of his feet
and glances up the canyon of tall buildings.
“So why did the Indian cross the road?” asks Lyman.
Jack groans. Indian humor is the worst. “Because the white man
built a freeway across his reservation. Wait, no. So he could walk in the
other ditch.”
“Nope,” says Lyman. “The Bureau of Indian Affairs Indian said,
‘CFR 49, Section 11299, gives me the authority to cross any time I want!’” (70).

Jackalope pokes fun of white heroes, too. But there, the tone darkens. When Jaq “Walks into Custer’s Last Bar,” she and other American Indians toss barbs about the general. Here, Low also shares other, lesser-known stories about the man: “Nevin Custer’s grandson once told Jaq about Custer’s Shawnee Indian mother. He soldiered against his own Native people, in slaughters like the Washita River in 1868” (118).
Moreover, this collection is a delight to read. Low’s techniques with sound and imagery are as strong as ever, and make the ephemeral tangible and the tangible, spiritual. She fuses history, legends, allusions and pop culture scenes to transform history into the contemporary and the contemporary into the eternal.

[Shirleynature · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Indigenous trickster tales feature an enchanting inter-gender cryptid based on the long-lived legend of a hybrid offspring from a jackrabbit mating with a pronghorn ("antelope"), but with contemporary cultural layers of meaning. And it’s apropos for this author that it echoes her heritage which includes Delaware (Lenape/Munsee), and Cherokee family.

This Indigenous-centered, shape-shifting, liminal, anthropomorphic storytelling & playful read is worth re-reading many times!

"This anthropomorphic animal is the cryptid on postcards you see at gas stations across the American Midwest--a rabbit with two iconic pronghorn antlers. Jackalope Kelley shifts between male and female identities: Jack when he's a man, Jaq when she's a woman." Ben Pfeiffer, Interviews Editor, The Rumpus

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am seriously flummoxed with this book as I don't know whether I like it or I dislike it. Furthermore I don't know whether I want to keep the darn thing or to let it go off to find its own home out in varied world of readers so I guess it has touched me in a way very few "new" books have touched me in a while.

First of all I loved the chosen cover artwork. It is just the right amount of intriguing surrealism that catches the eyes and yet just a bit of madness. The bright colors complement the darkness of the piece while giving enough of a background that you can understand the jackalope, its origins and its grasp on the world while implying at what may be floating around on the pages behind the cover itself.

As to what the pages harbor is a collection of non-rhyming poems, paragraphs that introduce you to the character of the jackalope and various short stories putting Jack/Jaq in varied settings some that to a Kansan who had also stayed in CO for a year seem similar to some that would be more or less an exotic locale. Furthermore the author does a wonderful job in setting the 'lopes in backgrounds that both have him or her stand out yet at the same time blends in like the trickster that Hare was known to be.

Denise did an excellent job in hitting the nail on the head with the jackalope's personality so that by the end of the book if you were a jackalope disbeliever it may have you rethinking that line. The personality for Jack/Jaq is a mixture of the known lore for the hybrid as well as a genius mixture of modern.

The book also does a lot of bringing the jackalope into the world of the modern Native. You meet different tribes but find they are mostly the same in their modern struggles, their role in this dreamy land where nothing is quite what it seems and how history has treated all of them. Underneath it all there is that common Native idea that we are all related and work off of each other for the betterment of all....

[James Benger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another five star book by Denise Low. Inventive, entertaining and ultimately human, "Jackalope" gives us a glimpse into the world of Jack (sometimes Jaq), the result of two species mating. The protagonist spends 149 pages wandering about the country, hanging out in Twitter bars, visiting basement saloons in Lawrence, KS and even standing on a street corner with Sherman Alexie's cousin. Packed with symbolism and multiple meanings, like all of Low's work, really, "Jackalope" cannot be shoved into one genre or one summary. It most definitely cannot be fully appreciated with one reading. This slim volume of interconnected flash fiction, short stories and poetry holds more depth and thought than many books several times its size. Apparently never one to rest, Denise Low continues to reinvent herself with each new book. "Jackalope" sees the author finding new ways to teach the world how truly sublime words can be. Regardless of background or literary preferences, like all of Denise Low's previous books, "Jackalope" has something to teach us all.

[Tyler Sheldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this collection of short stories--almost a novel-in-stories, something in structure akin to O'Brien's The Things They Carried (albeit with totally different subject matter). Jaq/Jack, the protagonist, is the mythological creature I've always wanted to meet, from their taste in art and social media to the wild characters they encounter in their travels. Pick up a copy of Denise Low's book, and I think you'll agree!

[Jim Potter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Storyteller Denise Low brilliantly sets the scene and pace in her book, Jackalopes.
The author encourages the reader to relax, have fun, and be entertained. On our exciting adventure (especially visiting bars), these friendly jackalopes experience bias, discrimination, even slaughter, by remnants of an oppressive colonial system.
While the animal kingdom is not always harmonious, fortunately, the spiritual dimension of the animals (including jackalopes, symbolic of American Indians) allows the reader to appreciate the magic in prayer, family, and community.
I highly recommend this enjoyable, thought-provoking book, and remember: injustice in Jackalope Country is injustice in every country.
Jim Potter, author of Taking Back the Bullet: Trajectories of Self-Discovery.

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short story collection of the mythical creature the Jackalope. The Jackalope is a trickster in many folktales, and this modern spin on it brings him or her depending on the story into story lines with other mythical folktale like creatures in the modern world.