MORATORIUM

A poet’s poignant debut collection of prose stories.

Percesepe is an editor at New World Writing and an established, well-respected writer of poetry, but this is his first published book of short fiction, and it’s a stunner. It contains more than 35 stories, many set in and around upstate New York in winter, with sudden deaths or losses frequently serving as narrative starting points. In “You Look Different,” for example, a father is haunted as he replays a nightmarish scene in his mind: “the one the driver with the thick fingers never saw as he swerved on the ice to avoid the yellow school bus, in his panic not seeing the small dark form that was your son.” Percesepe returns often to two themes: how one continues to live on after the death of a loved one and how one’s recognition of frail mortality affects one’s ability to be intimate. “It’s not death that’s difficult,” one character in “Summer: 1972” insightfully explains to her lover, but the act of dying is: “Death loves us. Death is easy. It’s getting there that’s hard.” Some narrative voices appear more than once, but although readers are allowed glimpses of the same characters at different moments of their lives, they always seem to remain stuck, glaring “into the dead space of time,” like Joe in “Lulu,” reflecting on a lost love while visiting his childhood home for a funeral. Appropriately, Percesepe’s writing has been compared to that of the late, great Raymond Carver; both writers revel in brutal vulnerability—a world, as Percesepe puts it, in which “love is a brawler” and characters have “had sex for the first time at fourteen” and by 18, have “had four lovers, a drinking problem, and an abortion.” It’s a world that yields a startling and exceptional collection, and it’s one that comes highly recommended.

Powerful works that examine the violent and erotic lives of characters struggling with mortality.