“One of the marvels of this flash-fiction collection is Pokrass’s ability to create fully realized complex characters in the tradition of literary realism typically associated with longer narratives, even novels. She achieves so much deep characterization in such a tight space that she is like an architect of tiny houses that allow her characters to live full lives in extremely small spaces. The collection buzzes with naked insights on female heterosexual desire. Exploring the complex disconnect between sex and love in the lives of women, Pokrass maps an interior landscape of tenderness and connection between lovers. The need for greater, longer lasting connection means women falling in love keep ending up alone. These stories explore what happens when love doesn’t last or when sex and love become conflicted, in a world where “humans, like amphibious animals, developed ugly traits to protect themselves.” -Aimee Parkison, Book Reviewer
Author reading of “The Bug Man” which first appeared in Tin House, published in the collection “Alligators At Night” (Ad Hoc Fiction). Such an honor to have the story included in Best Small Fictions, 2019!
“Meg Pokrass’s Spinning to Mars is composed of “Micros”–some seventy of them. She also calls it a “very short book,” but it’s one of the most readable and illuminating experiences you’re likely to have in the coming years. It’s low-key funny but also subtly chilling. It’s about the vicissitudes of love, but then it’s also about the gift, the surprise, and the unfairness of human relationships. I find myself giggling or tearing up or just staggering around the house with what these “Micros” have done to me.” – David Huddle, author of My Surly Heart.
“Meg Pokrass has written an exquisite collection of linked stories. As I read Spinning to Mars I felt plunged, soaked, immersed—however you want to get down into a life both deep and wide. This book will spin you off to Mars with its exacting language and biting insight. Here is the kind of compressed writing that I long for and rarely find.” – Sherrie Flick, author of Thank Your Lucky Stars
AVAILABLE TO BUY IN JUNE
The Dog Seated Next To Me (Pelekinesis Press)
“In the universe of Meg Pokrass’s fictions, planets are gloriously misaligned, stars and suns trail love and desperate sadness, black holes serve up dogs, spiders, cats, and galaxies explode everything we thought we knew about the human heart. It is an ever-expanding universe. No other like it.” — Pamela Painter, author of Wouldn’t You Like to Know
“The stories of Meg Pokrass are like beautiful bruises. I read them and ache. Sparse, poetic, insightful, and always astonishing. This is writing that makes you feel alive.” — Angela Readman, author of Something Like Breathing
“To enter the portals of Pokrassland is to go on a magical journey…Unpredictable, funny and charming, the world Meg Pokrass builds in The Dog Seated Next to Me is a location readers will enter gladly and, mesmerised, they will most definitely want to stay.” — Nuala O’Connor, author of Joyride to Jupiter and Becoming Belle
“The nuanced tonal complexity, which can go from the whimsical to a darker irony in the turn of a phrase, has been a signature feature of the work of Meg Pokrass. That complexity is, in her new collection, Alligators at Night, heightened further by the fertile invention and unpredictable interplay of these beautifully crafted pieces.” — Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots
“The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us. In her work, off-kilter is the same as clear-eyed focus. Here, strange and normal go hand-in-hand, a marriage that explains nothing but makes so much clear. Time after time, these little stories read big.” – Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and This Clumsy Living (University of Pittburgh Press, 2007)
“Meg Pokrass bops and slams through these little stories like some genius extraterrestrial psychic on a world tour of the human heart. Her language is supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts.” – Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and The Girl in the Blue Beret
“I dare you to read a Meg Pokrass sentence and not want to read the next. Just enter that voice voice and it makes magic. It’s the kind where you don’t know where you’re going until you’ve left, but you know it was deeply right to have been there. Unassuming, ridiculous, insightful, dark.” – Robert Shapard, editor of seven anthologies for W.W. Norton from Sudden Fiction to Flash Fiction International.
“Meg Pokrass gets a lot done in the shortest spaces imaginable, whole worlds in a handful of words, a teeming city of characters arising from mere paragraphs, 55 stories that just won’t quit. And laughs! And tears! And those moments when you have to stop reading and think for a day. With The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, Flash Fiction comes of age.” – Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love and Life Among Giants.
“Serious and witty, mystical and dark, Pokrass’ poems are small windows into another world, a world which is almost this world. But not quite. I find myself wanting more, always a little more of her work. One short poem, one small collection, it is never enough. In short, and in her very short and masterful pieces, Pokrass leads her readers on, page by page, enticing them with her beautiful and dream-like language. Pokrass’ writes books you want on your nightstand to read not once, but again and again.” – Nin Andrews
