Easter Rabbit
By Joseph Young | Review by J.A. Tyler
Adam Robinson of Publishing Genius Press dared, threatened, swore that readers would not, could not, dare not take in all of Joseph Young’s micro-fiction collection Easter Rabbit in one sitting. A valiant and sweltering challenge, and it is true—you cannot take this collection in one sitting, you cannot digest it all in a single read, but I believe there should have been a secondary challenge: go ahead, try and review this book, try and make Easter Rabbit into a comprehensible, reader-focused review, try and fit it into a literary box or mold or shape.
Tyler v. the Publishing Genius: 0 to 2.
Easter Rabbit is an enormous book. Monstrous. I read it once—it took me a solid week of pick-it-up, set-it-down, pick-it-up, set-it-down. I read it again. Quicker this time, but still ran into days. I read it a third time, just before starting this review, and I have nothing more lucid to say now. Easter Rabbit takes words and makes them mean more, makes them hit us harder, makes us see better how language functions in short breaths, in gasps, in tight fists:
Sine
A white line, across the cement, under the park, through the door, faint and hardly there, to its red center.
Grand
The earth broke and they stood looking, the soaring backs of the crows. He thought he might drop a penny, have them carry it over the desert like a red egg. She thought she might drop herself, wind sliding up her skirt like a friend’s hand.
Fourth Certainty, Right Time
He shared a cigarette with the dentist, who’d just pulled a tooth, the nurse from next door. I have a man inside, she said, with a tumor in his eye. They stopped, marked the quiet of the suffering train.
There you are. That is roughly beginning, middle, end of Easter Rabbit. A gift from a Rumble reviewer. Go ahead. Make sense of it. Chew it. Run it over your teeth and feel the way it is like mountains, but when you take it out it is just words, little words in little spaces, letters and making a world.
Kudos Joseph Young. We await more.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is a terminator.