Kissing the Monster Hunter

Kissing the Monster Hunter is a new chapbook about monster hunters, unseen monsters, perpetual dreamers, and the creatures (human and otherwise) who love them. The unmissable prose poems and micros in this collection thrust us into an alternate reality where hope, love, and intimacy, when gone unrecognized, become a mystical force to be reckoned with.

In this wonderful mingling of reportage and dreamscape, Nessie’s appearance becomes a beacon for lovers. Here we have a collection with a ripple effect; one story causes another, widening and deepening the ultimate mystery of ourselves. Who can forget the monster hunter’s baby teeth? The insistence on love at all costs? Reading Pokrass’ work is akin to a Nantucket ride, once you start, there’s no stopping. Darkly comic and wildly original. Brilliant!
– Frankie McMillan, author of The Wandering Nature of Us Girls

Surreal, poetic, and strangely beautiful, only Meg Pokrass can take a monster and make it sexy. She searches deep waters and fishes out our curious beating hearts. Another triumph, this book is a love letter to craft from a master of the short form.
–Angela Readman, author of Bunny Girls and Don’t Try This At Home

House of Grana Padano

In The House of Grana Padano, co-written by Meg Pokrass and Jeff Friedman, each shimmering micro story hovers between standup comedy and the unfolding of tragedy, between the mask and the mirror:  A salesman tries on a suit and gets lost inside it; an ex-wife moves into a house made of Grana Padano cheese while her former husband nibbles the corners; and a father folds his daughter so tightly into his chest that her childhood disappears. Two modern masters of the fabulist micro, Pokrass and Friedman stretch language like magicians who are deep into their most amazing acts, creating elusive personas who can mime love, hate, anger or sorrow. The characters in these stories are searching for a moment to grasp, a future in all the dissolution around them, a family to love or curse. This improvisational collaboration between two critically acclaimed authors takes microfiction into a playful surreal universe that is wildly humorous and deeply truthful.

Praise for the book

“Here in House of Grana Padano are deft and absorbing micro-tales, surreal, yet sparked with characters achingly universal in their quest for attainment…Here is an annealing of two major talents, and this is their illuminated manuscript of fabulistic tales with gold and lapis lazuli on every page, and yes, too, the grit and poetry of life.”
– Robert Scottellaro, author of What Are The Chances? & Bad Motel

“Jeff Friedman’s wild and engaging images, the stuff of elegant and fabulist prose poetry, and Meg’s Pokrass’s dazzling and unique use of disjunction in line after line, story after story, merge here as these two virtuoso writers just do what they normally do. But here they do it together.”
– Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications

“Jeff Friedman and Meg Pokrass prove that collaborations, in the hands of masters of short prose, can be revelatory. Like two seasoned jazz musicians, their imaginations play off each other, so that their tales–the astonishing and often quirky worlds and characters they create–avoid the randomness found in so many failed surrealistic prose poems and microfictions. You never know what’s coming next, but, somehow, it all makes sense.”
– Peter Johnson, author of Old Man Howling at the Moon

Spinning to Mars

Praise for ‘Spinning To Mars’

“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 

“William Faulkner famously wrote all those hefty expansive novels about his “own little postage stamp of land.” A supreme maker of Micros, Meg Pokrass in her adhesive and compressed collection of slips of the tongue, Spinning to Mars, creates exquisite prose postage. Within their precise selvages are whole intact and exacting universes, franked and cancelled galaxies. Philatelist Pokrass knows a good paradox when she writes one (or 70 some of them)—like how a tightly bounded space contains a multitude of possibilities, infinite points of points. She delivers, one issue after another, these little intaglio lozenges of singing, sinning synecdoche. These burbling bubbles of benday-ed miniature maps are really something, somehow more detailed than the mere life-sized things they represent.”
– Michael Martone, author of The Moon Over Wapakoneta and Brooding

The Loss Detector

Set in coastal California, The Loss Detector is a funny/sad portrait of teenage blues and of a small, transplanted family of non-conformists. The flawed but lovable characters in Pokrass’ novella remind us of how the world’s most beautiful places are not always the easiest in which to thrive. Moments of giddy, perceived freedom set against resignation dot the narrative in such a way that will leave you changed.

Praise for The Loss Detector

“Meg Pokrass is the virtuoso of the weird, a specialist of the out-of-the-blue. Her stories take the unexpected route every time, so that with each line the reader is bumped out of her preconceptions. Sometimes even the end of a sentence cannot be counted on. Her narration is confiding but marvelously unsettling…everything you never knew a novella-in-flash could be.”
– Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time

“Meg Pokrass’s sentences are shot through with wildness and her characters are deliciously untamed. The Loss Detector may be about stumbling adolescence within a dysfunctional family but every paragraph in it is a bible for how to live – with humour, affection, and a dose of anarchy.”
– Michael Loveday, author of Three Men on the Edge

The Dog Seated Next To Me

Praise For The Dog Seated Next To Me

“Meg Pokrass 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.”
– Aimee Parkison, Rain Taxi

“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

“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

“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

Click on the icon to view videos of readings from The Dog Seated Next To Me, as well as songs inspired by stories in the book.

Praise for Previous Collections

“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

“Meg Pokrass writes like a brain in search of a body. Warm, dark, unforgiving.”
– Frederick Barthelme, author of Double Down

“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 and This Clumsy Living

“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 Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015)