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