Put Your Head In My Lap
by Claudia Smith | Review by J.A. Tyler
It is like Claudia Smith is trying to bury me in words, one on another, and they are little words and very unassuming so that even as they steep and mount and touch my chin, I am still only smiling at the way they are used.
Put Your Head In My Lap by Claudia Smith is the latest release from the ever-present Future Tense Books and is basically a whirlwind of subtle wit, clever linguistic arrangements, and complex emotional states pulled together under the guise of simple story-telling.
from Marks:
“When he falls asleep, she leaves and looks in on their child. Transparent hair and blue eyes; perhaps his eyes, his hair. She would like to touch the whorl on the back of his head, but it would wake him.”
An especially unique feature of Claudia Smith’s work is how she maneuvers within and around dialogue without losing the intensity of phrasing or the aggressive hold on each scene. Too often dialogue becomes either a stopgap for exposition or a stumbling, bumbling kind of imaginary world, leaning on what we think is spoken dialogue rather than what is actually our phrasing, but Smith instead holds her poetic fists and makes the conversations tackle the natural mode of our speaking while still fitting the rhythmic pull of each narrative.
from Leak:
“Mom, you know what you do when you stir like that?” “I’m simmering the vegetables.” “You shimmer it. It’s called you shimmer it, Mom.”
The moon was pressing against the back door, leaking slivers of light in through the cracks. The house wasn’t well insulated. Her son asked if it was a monster.
“It won’t get in, don’t worry,” she told her son. “How do you know?” “I won’t let it.”
Put Your Head In My Lap accomplishes what so many young flash/vignette writers are attempting at every online and print journal with a pension for the shortest of stories: a crisp, clean, complex narrative woven with invisible plot and seamed by tangible characters who do not require thousands of words in order to exist. Claudia Smith makes them real, shapes their faces, and does so in a quiet avalanche of small words, one at a time, until we are unknowingly bricked into her humanity.
from Pillow:
“The sky was an over-bleached sheet, stretched to the point of ripping. Everything worn but clean. He was saying he’d be happier if we lived in Canada. The sun seemed very close, like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. Maybe I could pull it down. Our baby had died, but he didn’t call it a baby. This was the year we lived on 32nd Street.”
Go get Put Your Head In My Lap. It will pile words on your chest, and you will smile as you suffocate.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is a male human.