Carol Guess

The voice narrating Carol Guess' newest book is that of a playfully effusive but meticulous cataloguer of our darker inquiries and oddities, a suburban former dancer with the inner life and vision of an epic librettist. Darling Endangered is nothing short of exceptional, a rare breed of hybrid that works between the "flash" of short fiction and the swift bite of the lyric. From the dizzying, battered nostalgia of youth remembered to the experiential trappings of maturity, Guess' collection maps the journey of a singular, sensitive existence through an ever-illuminating world of wayward hawks and track star meth addicts, avalanches and hot dog carts, zombie buildings, the works of Balanchine and Pachelbel, and the promises of love and love's disorders. You will not read another book quite like it.

Read an interview with Carol Guess at Flash Fiction Chronicles.
Read a review of Darling Endangered at JMWW.
Visit her website at carolguess.blogspot.com

Carol Guess is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as three forthcoming collections: Doll Studies: Forensics, Willful Machine, and My Father In Water. She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University. Follow her at: www.carolguess.blogspot.com.

Carol Guess

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Darling Endangered

"It's commonly posed that history unwinds itself, that the events of a people or life reveal themselves to the eye, that the fibers of a story are made loose with investigation and discovery. The opposite, however, is true in Guess's Darling Endangered, in which as you read you are closed tighter, sewn closer, bound better to the life and lives of the narrator, the narrators, the speakers of these stories. The words and images of these pieces—the stairs and stages and studios, the kisses and misses—accumulate like coats, heavy and harrowing and grave, yet all the while precise, lovely, and true."
—Joseph Young, author of Easter Rabbit

"Hand-over-heart, with pink beds, green plastic guns, clicksliver needles, and cardboard-giving milk, the fictions of Carol Guess's Darling Endangered are the most darling gifts. Even with their parasitic twins, they are not to be endangered. A lovely, lyrical must."
—Kim Chinquee, author of Oh Baby and Pretty

"I love this collection of very short fictions. Carol Guess builds the most wondrous word-nests, each one holding something precious, each one surrounded by the world-at-large, afire. In remarkable lyrical fiction after another, Carol Guess writes her darling heart out."
—Randall Brown, author of Mad to Live and founder of Matter Press