FlashFiction.Net

Author: Carol Guess
Title: Tinderbox Lawn
Publisher: Rose Metal Press
Year: 2008
# of pages: 60
# of pieces: 51
# of sections: 4; Walk All Ways With Walk (15 stories), Dodge and Burn (11 stories), Echolocation (11 stories ), Empty Girl, Pink Sleeve (14).

In order to read Carol Guess’s prose poetry collection “Tinderbox Lawn,” I had to sit with each piece individually, reading with care, nurturing each word. There isn’t a story that deserves a one-time read or a lazy glance. Her lyrical sentences and provocative imagery explore life with an intensity that leaves the reader just as vulnerable and exposed. Themes of identity, sexuality, and gender pulse on each page—her words breathe. In this book, you’ll be pulled deeply into yourself and wanting to stay in this place. The epigraph for her book, written by Richard Siken, shows the depth she’s willing to take us:

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

When I read Guess’s prose poetry, I’m reminded how the written word has the ability to transform the mind—how powerful language can be, how trusting we are when handled by a writer with the ability to tear us open and mend us all in the same read.

Her collection has 4 sections: Walk All Ways With Walk, Dodge and Burn, Echolocation, and Empty Girl, Pink Sleeve. As each prose poem is untitled within these sections, it is hard to imagine them as simple stories. Though brief, she has the ability to—in 21 words—landscape a larger picture, a wide story full of moments beyond the page. She writes, “We lay in the tall grasses. We were just girls then. This was all written in the palm of your hand.” That particular prose poem visits “identity” in a provocative way; time is relevant and irrelevant. There’s a past, present, future, and I feel very attached to these moments.

One of my favorite pieces has been pleasantly haunting me for days. Lines such as these—"My love and I made a baby from tangles in our hair; from roots, beads, and ginger beer; from the long tongue of memory. She was neither flesh of our flesh, nor craft, but a crashing cross between”—cannot ask you to simply be a reader. I want to feel these words, eat them if I could. I love writing that requires my presence, that asks for my trust. Her writing continues to build and build until the very end, surprises on every page. If you aren’t capable of being present, this book isn’t for you.

Carol Guess’s stories leave readers with new eyes. For example, she writes in "Name of Story," “You were the only woman in a workplace of men. Every morning you put on a dress and drove off. When you left the house you wore your ring on a chain, but at night you came home with a married girl’s finger. On the wall of your cubicle: photos of your brother so you wouldn’t have to tell all those men about me.” Such stories make you search for your own identity, re-invent yourself. At the end of this collection, you’ll feel new.

About the Author

Jess Bouchard, originally from upstate New York, is an alumni of Concordia University in Portland, OR, and is currently in her MFA program at Rosemont College. She mainly writes poetry but is recently very involved in flash fiction and prose. Currently, she's working on a book of poetry in her attic bedroom.

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