Bourne grapples with pain and loss in this collection of prose pieces and poetic fragments.

Sometimes the only thing to do with a negative emotion is to put it out into the world. In this book, the author (in the fictionalized guise of a woman named Sophie) lines up those who have wronged her and lets them know exactly what they’ve done. “She never paid any mind to my sister and me while married and certainly not after the divorce,” she writes of her emotionally unavailable mother. “It wasn’t as though she was integrated with or invigorated by us, her daughters. Rarely bought us clothing, only barely fed us.” Other targets include some bluebloods Sophie interacts with who exacerbate her working-class insecurity, an old high school guidance counselor she runs into at a pharmacy, and her stepfather, who doesn’t follow her dead mother’s funerary wishes. Not all the pieces are directed at specific people; many simply document Sophie’s lifetime of anxiety and rootlessness, both when she’s young, rambling, and experimenting with drinking and later, in middle age, as she rations pills and dreams of escaping her hometown. Memories of her unhappy childhood haunt her and the routines of adulthood frustrate her, from selling old clothes at a flea market to handling the affairs of dead and dying older relatives. Bourne’s pieces are broken into short paragraphs, many only a sentence long, which gives them a clipped, poetic feel. Here she describes driving across the country, leaving miles and days between the line breaks: “Rigs dotting the landscape as if a herd of metal beasts of burden. / Coming upon the vast expanse of Albuquerque in the evening. / A city in a sparkling bowl. / Arriving to the hostel in Santa Fe and getting a private room.” The best pieces, such as “The Giant,” tend to be longer, with stronger narrative elements. The cumulative effect will strike some readers as overly gloomy, but many will see themselves in Sophie’s ennui.

A simmering collection of resentments and remorse.

A woman in her 50s looks back on her own and her family’s history in this collection of short stories and poems.

Most of Bourne’s brief stories and musings, set across the United States, unfold chronologically and star Sophia (an autobiographical stand-in for the author), a woman who, over the course of the book, goes from adventurous youth to middle-aged writer reflecting on her life. In the opening story, “1974 The River,” the narrator writes how lucky she is to have swum in the same turbid waters that her family has waded in for generations. The dirt, she believes, makes her stronger, more resilient. This tale sets the tone for a book that often considers time and its effects. Sophia’s own exploits aren’t particularly remarkable. She works in food service, she holds some office jobs, and she has lovers, some unfaithful. As she gets closer to middle age, she ponders the deaths of her loved ones and her increasing financial insecurity (“My modest savings quickly become worthless with the inflation that has hit”). What’s interesting about these anecdotes isn’t so much the outcomes of Sophia’s adventures but the immediacy and candidness of the prose: “I held my own, though. I worked hard,” she writes, detailing her time working at a sleazy restaurant. Short sentences like these highlight her resilience, and by the end of the book, in entries like “2017 A Year of Weeping,” “2022 Lua Rosa,” and “2022 Peasant Strength,” she uses poetry as a way to more concisely express her emotional turmoil and resolve. She notes how she needs “to heal / from this, that, or the other chaos,” but in writing the poem, she finds the strength to do so. Though some readers may be put off by the sudden shift in style, the poetry offers new ways to consider the themes of wisdom, grief, and tenacity.

A pensive, raw look at aging and time’s passing.