Trick with a Knife

Review: Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young

Mar 09

Spencer DewReview easter rabbit, microfiction, publishing genius press, spencer dew 2 Comments

The tiny pieces collected in this volume, averaging around 35 words in length, offer up implications of broader narratives. In remarkably few letters, Young presents people and their physical and emotional locations.

There is the feel of haiku to some of these pieces – the invisible, the taken-for-granted, rendered in precise and unexpected ways. Yet more importantly there is the occurrence of epiphany to the very human characters of Easter Rabbit – bone-crushing epiphanies, as when a man realizes that the same voice sounds “not unlike his lover, his mother, a wounded horse.”

Young delineates, faintly but nonetheless viscerally, the obsessions and terrors of the unnamed “he”s and “she”s and “they”s that people this book, their acts of remembering, their plumb lines and chalk, their approach to the edges of the idea of their own mortality.

Realism remains a constant here, and while Young certainly flirts with philosophy (the third section of the book is called “God Not Otherwise,” made up in part of propositions of “certainty”), any abstraction is grounded in the banal, confronted, as one piece has it, with cutlery, “over the hot sauce and napkin pile.”

Style and form intertwine, and where Young fumbles is when he deviates from rigorous minimalism and simply says too much. The filmmaker turned desert poet of one piece, for instance, simply doesn’t convince.

Perhaps, too, notions of freedom and self-determination don’t generate the tone that Young and this micro-format are best suited to nail down. In the most haunting wisps, despite the sense that it’s high time for the folks described therein to move on, escape, they cannot.

Here is where Young’s lyricism hits hardest at its mark: a kind of claustrophobic restriction mirrored in the sparse, unshakeable language. Young’s characters manage to miscommunicate with hardly any words exchanged. They ponder their own blood, their own pain, their own entrapment, their own regret.

Sometimes this is aestheticized by startlingly original phrasing, as when the man in Valentine is described as having “a valve that was wrong, perched whitely among the viscera.” More often, however, the limits of these characters’ worlds stand, in the short span of the pieces, as wonders for the reader. The reflected brake lights crossing a ceiling, the bird bones arranged into letters on pavement – these are tantalizing, giving the individual piece success by making the reader want more.

There is a pattern worth noting here, too: Easter Rabbit’s characters, trapped in their fearful circumstances, miss the astonishing details around them, permeating their otherwise tragic lives. As Young’s art aims a laser pointer at precisely such details, he seems to be speaking, on this point, to us, his readers, as well.

“They’d labor on, these people, without fruit it seemed, though in fact the table was sweet in the blossoms of it,” Young writes, offering us both the harsh fate of his characters and the author’s gifted perception for the overlooked wonders of the world.