Darling Endangered
by Carol Guess
Brookly Arts Press, 2011
ISBN 978-0141025124, 160 pp., $14.00

A piece of writing that is nostalgic often works better if it still has an erotic energy to get you to go on reading after you've been led into uncomfortable memories. You need some energy for the next round. It could be that there is a cycle to a good reverie that gets you properly into it and out of it. As I sink into this work, I feel like the author has purposely written short pieces to perform three-minute reveries, yet with this kind of cyclic intensity in mind.

The little known Ultradian rhythm is a ninety-minute cycle where attention and body systems synch and renew. In therapy this makes for a more relaxing time when things go in hour-and-a-half chunks.

Similarly, a writer of short fiction touches on a part of the attention that renews every few minutes, as though the space of time in which a reverie occurs is quantifiable and thus malleable. Carol Guess' book is 61 lyrical fiction pieces that take the reader on emotional departures and returns. To keep the reader's attention as she evokes old awkward years, she capably conjoins clear images with a depth of self-reflection, using images too unique not to be real, juxtaposed with instances of truly subtle feelings. One wants to have understood themselves as well as her main protagonist.

From "Suburbiana":

Pale orange curtains, like push-up popsicles. Everything sherbet in the sky room at once. I like to be alone all day, except for an hour in a cerulean foyer with people being kind unfeigned.

These three-minute thought trail paintings are linked together as listed in seven locations. They evoke a different angle as magically realish as Italio Calvino's thin cities; cities of memory, Guess' names for these places: Suburbiana, Central High School of Needle Trades, Second Left in a Town of Right Turns, The Orange Room, The Ruined Garden, Detritus of the Longest Night, and Hearth.

Each of these locations has a different atmosphere. You can tell that some of these mental realms are places of memory, of old strange places that a soul did not quite fit into.

From "Second Left in a Town of Right Turns":

"Someone's life pack up and left. Lavender fields for sale" There is a peace that should be itself, but someone is trying to make more of it. It is a calm image that screams.

"The life you were promised sleeps somewhere in the shade."

This sentence evokes the wrongness of a life settling but even more so, the odd disappearance of a person from a place. What remains and what aches is a living vital memory, but it is a place where a soul gets restless. The energy moves on,

My favorite by far is The Orange Room. You can tell there is a dynamic youthful jumpiness here. It's exciting.

"We lived off of filched surimi, and rain caught in wooden spoons. We never touched."—"Fremont Bascule"

Here is a place where the imagination of two conjoined souls burns with the magic of synchronicity. Only with the ability to see meaning together, can such places and times exist as though romance has it's own eyes. In a piece called "Zugzwang," you can see this at work especially well.

We couldn't stop tasting cinnamon. Maybe we made each other up. Perfume and blood strippled banquettes in underground clubs. The sliver of water we glimpsed through our window turned into two men folding clothes in their condo.

There are too many moments to name and vivisect from their reveries. But one room must be mentioned. From Central High School of Needle Trades, the beginnings of how life lived forms theories on feminism comes out in the poem titled after the chapter. Her protagonist has earned her thinking through dance, and the ecstasy of self-contortion over time.

…and the dancers spin, drowned out in thigh and violin. She wants to be small that way again. If you unfold her, you must fold her precisely as she was before. Bend her backward to undo the motion forward. Chin to chest; now head to spine. It happens all the time: girls curl inward and can't unlock.

Her "Five positions of the feet catalogue transgressions of mind and society that a young woman assigns herself."

Second Position

To be open to anything, she must move both ways at once. And never sleep. She scatters left and right, center tight against temptation.

Third Position

We're halfway between bussing tables and Tulle.

A bittersweet nostalgia comes up like fumes. We've all tried to hard, but it was what was required. Guess' protagonist knows she earned the Hearth. Her romance was always intense. Her "Valentines flew point first into the shredder." What she sees now still thrills her. Her "White Rock" tells of the grit; even stability has "Red lights, bail bonds, dark drop, crunk,...International Rumspringa away from the cube, from the start we promised no tattoos." It's clear that she has a character that has been pried open by living. Life has its emotional costs. What seems like a simple book of lyrical sort fiction is. And what is inside is a really hard look at life in various epochs or incarnations. Oh yes, and the protagonist went to the prom with another girl. She's such a daredevil that she wanted to be herself. It's a fantastic book to read. My copy is already worn.—Emily Peterson Crespo