Status Updates From In The Year Of Long Divisio...

I've read about half of this book, and I couldn't tell you what happened in any of the short stories. The only reason I'm still reading it is because I want to be able to give a fair assessment in the review. Plus I'm wondering if there is some redeeming value in the second half of the book because I honestly have no idea how this got published.

Poetry layered into meaning. Allow the words of the sentence to embolden you. A widow imagines a boat ride to locate a place for her death so she may die with dignity, real or imagined.

The title story of this collection is rendered in changes of atmospheric pressure, shadings, minute in its shiftings and changes. It remains within as a ghosting, a vein-crossed haunting. In this unique style recollections vanish within a carried inward pulsing. One story at a time so this is not missed for the beauty of a collage. So different than anything before.

There is an experiment, no an intention where she creates an experience not named, the atmosphere and physical sensations of a peaked memory. She intends to have it, plotless, embedded into our fiber where it cannot be gotten rid of. It is here that she succeeds.

The very first story of this collection, We Were Our Age, Raffel has located the place where poetry and fiction meet; where the poetic accounting of sensations randomly scattered across the page moves the silhouette of a plot forward. It is as much about what is said as what is not, the blank spaces appropriating room for the reader to gain the courage to enter.