Love the prose of Alyson Hagy. Her third collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, just came out from Graywolf Press, and has eight stories highlighting the hardscrabble lives of the rural natives, past and present. The stories were originally published in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Five Points, and Idaho Review (Every collection I read, I see where the stories were originally published, and after reading each story I see if my perception of the journal is validated or adjusted).
Two of these stories, “Brief Lives of the Trainmen” and “Oil & Gas,” are notable for the way they merry-go-round the point of view, swirling from character to character as if the story is designed to give you more of a tableau of the time and space than the journey of a particular person. The POV’s a shifting limited omniscient, which novels use frequently, but not short stories.
Anyway, I thought I’d give you a taste of some of my favorite lines from the book. Enjoy.
- He calibrates stoic sentences.
- I left Armand and went into an afternoon braceleted by high, white clouds. They were spaced like beads on an invisible string.
- I walk to the far side of town when the horizon is still iron plated with darkness.
- I was so busy admiring Sukie’s dimples that I missed the rattler’s buzz between her words.
- What it brought him, as far as she could tell, was a clean, white dignity he could sail above his griefs.
- The rope of feeling swung in her chest again, cold, jerking.
- The biggest mountains in the range took twilight into their teeth.
- Livia followed the serrated sound of adult laughter.
- Morning is rolling on its rim.
- Otherwise, the rage sluicing along the veins of his forearms will overwhelm his good thoughts.
- Small cumulus clouds roost on the western horizon.
