Our Us & We

by J.A. Tyler

There is a formula. The addition of a boy, writ, and held rapt for undivided hours by the winds howling in from the Mtns west of Fort Collins, Colorado. Our Us & We is a tromp through town in a subtracted hearse. Every page packed with enough wonton word-play to make even the headiest of word-slingers blush. No, better there's a job to do. They pay you slightly more than minimum wage to drive the hearse but there's never been any deceased folk to transport until now. And you hit every red light on the way to the burying grounds. You sort of like your job. The sun is just about to set and the town is nearly empty except you, and your copy of Our Us & We.


5.5" x 8.5" Chapbook. hand-stamped text and images,burgundy covers with title wrap. Printed on high quality cotton paper. Ephemera end paper. Printed in an edition of 100.

15 pages

About the author

J. A. Tyler is the author of The Zoo, a Going (Dzanc Books). His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, and New York Tyrant among others. He is also an interviewer for Ploughshares.

Reviews

[Andrea DeAngelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This slim volume is a dream dreaming. Making connections in that primed Primordial soup. This is every dream you've ever had. How do you speak of dreams? You can't, not really. That is why they dissolve upon waking, sometimes immediately, sometimes slowly like an hourglass with a microscopic leak.

How do you speak of the bleeding away of childhood? Of death, of the dead not quite gone. Like this. Our us & we separating, isolating into I. How adulthood devours childhood. How adulthood longs for before.

Or is it the murder of childhood? At times it is. Perhaps it is pure undigestible language of uncommunicable horror. But it is more.

At times it is a celebration, a reveling in nostalgia, in the rush of the woods in the existing in the moment. At times it is everything. The nightmare, the strange and the daydream all weaving together in vivid sensory detail.

Or this elusive work might take place in the pre-existence, pre-birth and this is regret reverie of becoming fully formed. Or it is the consciousness of the afterbirth being discarded.

But this is only my interpretations of this dream of many dreams and there are as many interpretations as there are dreams. The many meanings, the ongoing kaleidoscope vision of J. A. Tyler's writing.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Score one for ever guy and women. A chilling and complex read. Easily my favorite of Tyler's shorter works, and here are some I don't like as I spend too much time fishing for the drawn lines hiding, but Ours Us & We steps it up.