Review: Stories, Poems, and Memoir Blend Together in This Interesting Collection
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 9, 2014
“Crossroads from Damascus: Mississippi Headlights” is a hybrid of genres—part fiction, part memoir, and part poetry. The author ties his fiction and poetry pieces into his own life with explanatory notes beforehand, giving you insight into where he was in life when he wrote that particular work.The book begins with the disjointed story “The Swab,” a brief snapshot in time of a man who is recalling the vicious murder of an auctioneer/hairdresser and two of his clients—it sets up the style and tone of the rest of the book, as the author often meditates on small moments in life and the emotions that accompany them, using spare and to-the-point prose. The author then alternates between personal vignettes about his wife, the birth of his two children, and his own experiences with weed, trying to hold down a job, and financial problems, including bankruptcy. There’s even a song he wrote for his wife, a children’s story, and a short act that could be from a play about the companionship two people enjoy while smoking.Three pieces stood out to me in the collection; one of my favorites was “The Candlestick” (the children’s story) in which a little girl goes on an adventure in her dreams, searching for a candlestick at the end, and gains great wisdom from all the creatures she meets along the way. “Repentance,” a story of two estranged sisters briefly coming together in fleeting moment on an Indian reservation, also had great emotional resonance in its portrait of a family that has drifted; the poem “The Hem of the Garment,” about the author’s daughter’s broken shoe, is a little slice of heartbreaking life.While I did find some of the stories slow going, I did enjoy this book as a whole; the perspective from which the author writes is one of honesty and perseverance. His love for his wife and daughters shines through, and his work effectively explores themes of forgiveness, redemption, depression, desperation, and love of all sorts, from companionate to passionate to the love of a parent for a child. Recommended for readers who like anthologies of work that showcase an author’s life and how it intermixes with and affects the expression of his talent.