Emotional intimacy is at stake in Thomas Morris’s latest story collection, Open Up. The stories feature characters struggling to find connection with others, and not often succeeding. These results are particularly depressing given that many of the relationships Morris explores are those of families—fathers and children, especially. Too often these characters, who are expected to be close, end up with distance between them.
The flower is a sexual organ. Our preeminent symbol of romance, the biology of the rose is mechanistic and doomed—though, maybe that’s just the problem with biology… Roses bloom; with a little help from insects, pollinate and are pollinated; wilt; and die. Sneezing in springtime, we are overtaken by the desperation of the flowers, sending themselves into the wind. “How could I forget,” Reines writes in one poem, “I always wanted to give my heart to the world.”
By imparting specificity, and therefore dignity, onto working-class concerns, Baglin makes them impossible to ignore.
There seem to be two themes in Elissa Altman’s passionate memoir Permission: one, the trauma of writing about a hitherto suppressed family event; the other, to judge from repeated words and phrases, a sense that she will never ever feel fully released from being ostracized for writing it. But the argument at the center of Permission is firm: one needs permission to write a memoir because no one owns a story. This is what Elissa Altman teaches her own students in memoir writing workshops.