The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down

Etruscan Press, 2016

“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

Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Poetry Award winner)

In a smattering of sassy, wry words Meg Pokrass creates a universe of love in Cellulose Pajamas.  These sexy but wistful prose poems hint at entire constellations of affections, relationships at once sweet, sad, satisfying—and not.  The poet’s delicately surreal metaphors give her poems so enticing an air that they seem to wear perfume.  Care to lounge about dressed in greens?  Try on Meg Pokrass’s splendid Cellulose Pajamas.
– Molly Peacock, Author of The Second Blush

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, Author of The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum.

I have admired Meg Pokrass’s work for a long time—Damn Sure Right and Bird Envy among other books.  Cellulose Pajamas contains that same bold quality: stories painful and joyful at once.  Meg Pokrass proves once again that she can write an epic on the head of a pin!”
– John Skoyles, poetry editor, Ploughshares. Author of A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and The Situation, A Moveable Famine and The Nut File

Meg Pokrass has the gift of a fluid imagination. Strange and beautiful prose poems pour across the pages of her new book in a confluence of the surreal and the mundane. It’s as if Raymond Carver and Russell Edson had collaborated on these fine poems, which manage to be fierce and vulnerable at the same time.  Cellulose Pajamas is a moving, haunting, riveting book.
– Ellery Akers, Author of Practicing the Truth, and Knocking on the Earth

Prose poems require a particular intensity to be truly successful. Pokrass has no problem with that constraint. This book is a breathtaking as racing a car. There isn’t a single one of these fireworks that doesn’t completely satisfy. One of those few writers who can handle this form with grace and room after room full of magic.
– D.R. Wagner author of 20 books and chapbooks of poetry and letters (Rattlesnake Press)

My Very End of the Universe

My Very End of the Universe; Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form
By Chris Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel.

Awards & Publicity

My Very End of the Universe wins the Gold IPPY! (Independent Publisher’s Book Award)
KMSU Weekly Reader, discussing the novella-in-flash and reading selections from “Here, Where We Live”
Hear the playlist at Largehearted Boy
Meg’s interview at Brevity
Podcast author reading at The Next Book Blog

Praise & Reviews

My Very End of the Universe is a celebration and study of an increasingly popular genre: the novella-in-flash, a novella built of standalone flash stories. The novellas in this collection—Betty Superman by Tiff Holland, Here, Where We Live by Meg Pokrass, Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel, Bell and Bargain by Margaret Patton Chapman, and The Family Dogs by Chris Bower—are com­pact and specific, yet whole and universal, using the flexibility of the genre to offer a polyphony of setting and emotion. Accompanying each novella-in-flash is a craft essay by the author exploring the form’s power, uses, and unique characteristics. The book opens with a genre-defining introduction to the novella-in-flash by editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, which also offers historical and contemporary context.

Although the family struggles presented in these five novellas-in-flash are as old as time, the authors use the form to make them new and vital, each one presenting a self-contained galaxy of characters, while expanding—like the universe itself—into vaster realms of experience.

“The five novellas-in-flash in My Very End of the Universe are excellent type specimens of the genre, and the accompanying craft essays help give this chimeric form a theory and a practice. Writers interested in story structure owe it to themselves to add this book to their office bookshelves, but it’s adventurous readers who will surely benefit the most, finding themselves thrilled by the surprising tales within.”
– Matt Bell, author of In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

“My Very End of the Universe is indispensable reading for anyone who loves fiction that defies categorization—and for anyone who simply loves engrossing stories cast in superb prose. Each of these novellas-in-flash is exquisite in its own distinct way, and collectively they demonstrate what is possible when we break the traditional confines of form and dare to invent something new.”
– Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth

“Mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, family dogs, all the dramas, distilled, through flash, more potent than ever. My Very End of the Universe offers five outstanding examples of the novella-in-flash form itself, along with indispensable essays from the authors on what this blending of short and long can do.”
– Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire and California Tales

“In tornado-flung trailer parks and icy lakes, citrus groves and drugstore aisles, the characters of My Very End of the Universe yearn to soar like Superman but are, more often, prayed for. Daughters struggle to rescue mothers, sons clobber the weak, outlaws menace and bedazzle—and in 1893, a newborn says ‘Hello?’ in a tiny, astonishing voice. Compact, intense, and thrilling, these five novellas-in-flash show us that even in the smallest spaces, we can learn how to fly.”
– Rebecca Meacham, author of Let’s Do and Morbid Curiosities

Damn Sure Right (Press 53)

Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving
– Frederick Barthelme

Meg Pokrass is the new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny kingdom of micro and flash fiction.
– Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

Read Damn Sure Right a collection of miniature tales sure to ruin your waking hours the way you’ll want them ruined.
– Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In The Devil’s Territory

I feel Pokrass thinking through her sentences, suprising herself, taking chances. Some of her lines hover between the best stand-up comedy and Dostoevsky.
– James Robison, author of The Illustrator

Meg Pokrass’ flash fiction conveys entire worlds that are touching, haunting, funny, moving and strange in the most beautiful ways.
– Jessica Anya Blau, author of Drinking Closer to Home