A review by tumblehawk
Verge: Stories by Lidia Yuknavitch

5.0

Few writers can affect me on a physical level the way Lidia Yuknavitch does. It’s hard to describe. But you know how your bones and organs are settled into an arrangement in your torso that’s been settled through billions of years of evolution? Well, somehow Lidia’s fiction gets my guts feeling like they’re on the move. Intestines deciding to untangle, liver set aquiver, rib cage trying sometimes to open up like a pair of arms and other times to close in like a fist. Twenty stories of people’s lives on some sort of precipice, some edge; sometimes that’s rendered quiet and sometimes it’s loud. But these lives are crashing into something, even if its just themselves and the past. A couple early reviews have zeroed in on the brutality in some of these stories but there is so much beauty in that brutality and in these lumbering lives. What Lidia does so well that I’m in awe of is closing the gap between reader and page. In these stories (sometimes explicitly and other times implicitly) the reader isn’t invited into the story so much as they don’t have the option of remaining uninvolved. We are never let off the hook. Verge is out on Tuesday. Get it!