REQUIEM

by Teresa Carmody

Fiction. REQUIEM by Teresa Carmody is a "folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life," writes editor and author David Ulin in his Introduction. In this short collection of fiction, a lonely man plainchants for the waitress he once stalked, a sonless father serenades a fatherless son, and a bereft family gathers to bury a parent, providing an aching chorus of what is left. Carmody uses Biblical language to pierce the callous and bruised souls of these lost, and sometimes found, small-town Michiganders. In her raw spare stories, Carmody creates, says novelist, essayist and poet Carol Muske-Dukes, "a voice out of the backyard burning bush, a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own."

56 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2005

About the author

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues, 2005), Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and the chapbook Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). Other work has appeared in such publications as Bombay Gin, Fold Appropriate Text, American Book Review, emohippus greeting cards 1-3, and Drunken Boat. An organizer of the original Ladyfest and co-organizer of Feminaissance, Carmody is co-director of Les Figues Press and co-curator of the Mommy, Mommy! Reading Series in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Andi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Teresa Carmody’s Requiem available from Les Figues Press is a gritty, compassionate portrait of life in Michigan. The language is raw but polished, like a pebble of blood red carnelian rubbed smooth by a mountain stream.
In the extended essay “Hurrah, Hurrah,” which I had the esteemed privilege of reading in a workshop several years ago, Carmody paints each of her siblings with a brush of their own voices, using a Faulkerian structure to pull together a massive mural of life in a family where the language of Christian religion is so present that it infuses the sentences in their minds.
As David L. Ulin states in his introduction to the book, Carmody “is not trying to illustrate a point.” Instead, she’s helping us all see more clearly that we don’t see clearly at all. Our only point of view is our point of view. But then, maybe that is the illustrated point after all.

Read more of my reviews at www.andilit.com

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Feel like testing out that Rec=by=PUB'r system? This Carmody here is pub'd on the same press as Vanessa Place's Dies: A Sentence, Les Figues Press. Which is appropriate because a video interview with her pop'd up on utoob right after a thing from Place. This one ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqHXc...
oh look! Vanessa's there too!

At any rate, her gr=ratings are abyssal. She's not quite 0/0 because gr's math sucks ; but it's close.

Apparently, you'll want to avoid her work if The Bible offends you.