Pee On Water

By Rachel B. Glaser | Review by J.A. Tyler

This sentence The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog contains every letter in the alphabet.

There is this phrase about vowels: A E I O U and sometimes Y.

And how about isthay isway away entencesay inway igpay atinlay, which is a sentence in pig latin that, roughly translated, means this is a sentence in pig latin.

Rachel B. Glaser’s story collection Pee on Water is akin to these sentences: deceptively simple, seeming uncomplicated while also containing a much more complex point, a guide for a trip elsewhere, an intricate and delicate balance with the unseen or unknown or unrealized. Reading Pee on Water is easy (and fun and good and light). Understanding Pee on Water is hard (and deep and fraught and gloriously coarse).

Here is a paragraph by paragraph plot-point summary of the opening story ‘The Magic Umbrella’:

A girl opens an umbrella and it takes her to Mars where she meets aliens
The students wonder where the girl is until she flies through the window and into her seat
A bio of a different girl who wrote the story of this previous girl
While camping, the fire turns into a face
The fire-face turns into a stick-man who swims in the ocean
The girl’s brother laughs and the stick-man swims
The girl takes the stick-man to a saloon
The stick-man leaves the girl to dance with a woman
The girl wonders why things like this always happen to her
The girl leaves the saloon
A bio of a different girl who wrote the story of the previous girl
Another girl described, two years younger than the previous girl
Another girl described, younger than all her sisters
Bio of Louisa May Alcott’s father
Continuing biography of the Alcott family
Description of Louisa as a child
Stories of Louisa as an older child
Short moments about the success of Little Women
Louisa meets the town sheriff.
The Sheriff helps Louisa understand how special she is
How Louisa falls in love and accidentally shoots the Sheriff in the heart
In sadness, Louisa labors years over her autobiography
Assertion that this book is Louisa’s labored-over autobiography
This book personified
This book discusses Nabokov and Cheever and Kerouac and others
This book attempts to speak to a reader
The book dreams of attending the symphony, the zoo, teaching, painting, and travel

This is how Glaser writes. It is complicated and something like when I listen to an Irish accent – I am intrigued and completely floored by the sheer rhythm and sound of it (smiling and not able to stop smiling) but also not really understanding all that is being said, the accent so thick and new and different and difficultly-joyous to wade through. Pee on Water is this. I looked back at the chapter titles more in this book than any other in recent memory – always thinking What the fuck am I reading? but with a smile on my face and with new words skipping happily through my head.

For example:

Someone makes a joke and the laughter elevates them. They beam at each other, waiting for the next joke, praying for it, but then silence. They look around the silence and grow used to this as well. They hope no one will make a joke. They wait expectantly and no one does. If they danced, the room would temporarily hold their energy, but no one much feels like it. They lie in the woman’s backyard and look at the stars. But the black of the sky is grainy. It always is, on Earth. The air smells too much like grass. Gracefully, one gets up to make an exit and the others follow in unison. It is pleasant to be near each other, but also pleasant to get in separate cars and hear their doors shut, to start their engines, reverse, brake, and drive away in all different directions.

And:

This love was big and swallowed reality. I’m not saying the love was merely symbolic. Just the emotions were so massive and bulky, everything else became off-hand. The love wasn’t a big deal. It was love. Like a kiss, it’s distracting. I worked at a store. Tom worked in a place. We lived smack in the middle of everything. Then we moved a little out of the way. These are just details. Tom was my favorite person I had ever met. My girlfriends, they were characters stuck in a phone. They were electronic people I could chat with, but they were not as real as Tom. My life with him was on a charmed track, a toy set kept going round and round and so we smiled.

There is more to talk about with this book – the title, the cover art by Glaser, the blurb-age, and a wealth of other things. We couldn’t pack it all in here though, so we interviewed Glaser. That seemed appropriate. And it was. Read the interview, learn more about this unassuming book of broken open language, then go to Publishing Genius Press to get your throbbing brain on the words in the words in the words. Let this strange and wonderful umbrella take you to Louisa May Alcott.

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.

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