notanotherbookreview

 Bamboo Dart Press has done it again, confounded expectations of what they publish with The 909 , a film by Mark Givens and Joel Huschle. David Scott Ewers, a Bamboo publisher and author of Ultimate Resort described the slender book. "Like a plastic mirror, The 909 reflects an image of California life that's both strangely attractive and not easy to look at. Unlike a plastic mirror, The 909 allows an even uneasier image to blossom in the shadow of the first. It is that of a sack being nailed to a shoe, forever. Funny and disquieting." This is a film that needs to be made, now that reality is catching up. It's a road trip where all cars move in straight lines and destinations shift. Shopping malls were once old downtowns. Abandoned strip malls are ghost towns. Starbucks, Best Buy, Apple stores exist, though people are few. Is this terrain related to the changes in area codes?  Why did L.A.'s 213 area code become 714 and then 909?  And why are codes continuing t...

THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME by Meg Pokrass (Pelekinesis, September 15, 2019.) Pokrass' flash fiction has the magic of loved and lost, humans and creatures. Imagine Flannery O'Connor would enjoy the dark wit of  Meg Pokrass ' THE DOG SEATED NEXT TO ME (Pelekinesis, September 2019) . Here the usual mysteries; love, youth, age, the games people play with themselves and others, the texture of time and our bodies, are given strange life. Pokrass often writes about us as creatures. The wilds we are and inhabit may refer to "familiars." Canine, avian, insect qualities are guides of sorts for the women relating stories. One shelters under her lover's wing. Another disappoints her husband when she falls for a blue tongued squink instead of the idea of a new baby.  Some samples below. The Rescue He told her how his parakeet died, all at once, in the middle of a regular day. A bird holocaust. She could see, behind his words, such gorgeous, frantic color that...