Kimberly King Parsons

In June I reviewed Eugene Marten’s terrifying third novel Firework (Tyrant Books) for Time Out New York. I said this:

“Like the janitor in the cult classic Waste and the locksmith from In the Blind, Jelonnek, the state-employee antihero of Firework, is a shiftless man whose routine is shaken by a series of twisted circumstances and terrible decisions. Marten masters a world of blue-collar minutiae with spare, striking prose and meticulous detail, but Firework is, at 370 pages, a breakout achievement that also tackles issues of gender, class, race, identity and family.”

In July I wrote two reviews: Shya Scanlon’s In this alone impulse for The Collagist and Dawn Raffel’s Further Adventures in the Restless Universe for 360 Main Street.

“Cleverly categorized by Noemi Press as “[p]oetry, kind of,” the “but” is the brilliance in these blocks of prose, each constrained to seven lines, each a fragment of some implicit, unseen total—As Scanlon writes, “I watched the whole thing through a pinhole in your pocket, and still went blind.”