Spinning to Mars

A collection of 70 linked micro stories about relationships and the difficulties of love. Winner of San Francisco’s Blue Light Book Award, 2021. Published by Blue Light Press.
Reviews and interviews: The Rumpus, The Bookends Review, After the Pause, The London Grip. “Spinning to Mars” became a #1 Amazon Bestseller in Women’s Poetry on the first week of its release!


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