Everything Falls into Place in “The Geography of First Kisses” https://ift.tt/Ot8pxPY
Karin Cecile Davidson’s new story collection, The Geography of First Kisses, like geography itself, studies relationships between people and places — character and climate, longing and landscape, and myriad properties in between. The Geography of First Kisses won Kallisto Gaia Press’s 2023 Acacia Prize. Davidson is also the author of a novel, Sybelia Drive, published in 2020.
In this collection she weaves earthy elements into 14 astonishing, character-driven narratives, redolent of the rural and urban circumstances and settings her characters inhabit. The smell of a coming hurricane; scents of soil or sizzling beef, or the dank loamy smells — sharp and bitter — of hunters skinning quail; the aged, cracked leather of a car’s interior: These striking and specific details immerse us, and drive these people and their circumstances straight to the heart. Her writing dips into every sense, serving words that are sweet, often stinging, edgy, and threatening. This textured prose sticks with you: long legs are “like scissors cutting up a room, slicing through stares,” or “frustrations flying around the room.”
In the title story Davidson poses the question: “Why is there no such thing as north by south or east by west? Why does direction turn only slightly, instead of leaning full tilt into another place, another time, another anything?” These stories do lean, full-tilt, into time and space, excavating complex forms of love, loss, and longing, starting with the title story’s unnamed narrator, who is “sweet sixteen and never been,” covering compass points, longing for a North Star or a magnetic pole, “to show me where I’d landed.”
Through roving viewpoints, including that of the occasional crow, she thoroughly controls her material, landing us, grounded but hungry for more, among strangers in unfamiliar territories. The title story’s geography ranges from “that southerly place” to that “northerly summer spot.” Body language permeates the piece: “small, sweet hands that liked to untie things like bikini tops,” and “eyes like pieces of eight,” and “Buzz, with a laugh that broke apart the stars.”
Davidson delivers Louisiana Bayous and an Iowa pig farm. Cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Tulsa, OK, and Buffalo-Niagara Falls. Even the Zoo Berlin, where a human mother bonds with a mama gorilla. As the narrator turns her back, she imagines “the jungle” of the mother gorilla’s mind . . . “with hope of reaching out and brushing the brilliant clouds beyond.”
One story draws water from a fabulist well. “In the Great Wide” opens with a litany of miracles — the crawfish boil intended to feed 25 serves 500; a hurricane’s eye uncannily dies prematurely over the delta, an old woman wakes 20 years younger and transforms into the infant in her daughter’s arms before disappearing. The story’s opening miracles augur this: The baby of an unwed mother in New Orleans mysteriously disappears. The mother arrives home to Maman Yvette, her grandmother, sweeping, with the baby Daphne now only a head rolling around her feet. As her best friend Mary observes: “. . . your baby has no body.”
“I know it looks strange and all. But in the great wide scheme of things, we really are quite all right.” So says the narrator.
“Great wide what?” says Mary. “Have you all lost your minds?”
The narrator is certain that no saint will help her baby. “And yet, if Daphne did fade away, no longer a baby, but a memory, what would I do? Since her birth, life had become glad and loud.”
The story is alive, New Orleans-style, with moss-covered bricks, walls, camellias — and plenty of Catholicism. When Daphne disappears from her crib, the narrator finally prays, recalling long-forgotten miracles, and uses a crucifix to dial the rotary telephone. She wakes Yvette, who believes she sees the baby. Despite multiple digressions, which for some may interfere with the main narrative, this story is startling, original, and unusual for Davidson, who typically threads her stories with minimal backstory. Eventually, the story returns to one of its detours and makes it pay. Its accomplished prose makes it a pleasure to read, digressive or not.
The collection offers no simple solutions, no easy, happy endings, only character-driven circumstances that reveal stories honoring the struggles — sometimes preposterous — of ordinary people making their way in the world. Each character understands more about life, themselves, their loves and losses, and the world. They emerge possibly better prepared — or not — as they turn slightly into “another place, another time, another anything.”
0 Commentaires