Synopsis "Southwestern Bliss. Tales All Shapes & Sizes"
"Yes, Byrnal had grown tired of rising long after sunrise each and every blasted morning to wonder where his horse, his money, his pistol, or anything else he owned had been unwittingly misplaced in the prior night's stupor - Or else, on the other hand, having to wonder who might have stopped by the house to pilfer these precious, virtually irreplaceable items during one of his increasingly frequent dissipations, with their attendant blacked-out amnesias... And with that big, stiff, cumbersome sum-bitch's corpse heaped in a pile in his own backyard so awkwardly and inconveniently, it seemed to Byrnal if there might shortly be the question of his personal liberty to consider with the same genuine sincerity, as well."
Southwestern Bliss: Tales all Shapes and Sizes is an insightful, multi-faceted selection of short, and even shorter, works of fiction with the scent and feel of the southwest, intermingled between chapters with intermittent outbursts of poetry. The shortest pieces, which might cover but a page or two, are almost without exception spit-milk-out-of-your-nose hilarious; featuring, in part, idiot-princess escapees, penniless losers with great big balls, and the latent beatdown of someone who just might turn out be Justin Bieber. However, the lengthier pieces can be phenomenally solemn and provocative, quite peculiar, and teeming with mind-bending complexities; with the author dutifully confronting universally relatable subject matter such as growing up, getting old, addiction, perversion, loneliness, death and dying, and ultra-surreal instances of familial serendipity with his own characteristically eloquent flair for language. This is made clearer when confronting the challenging, inscrutable snatches of verse interspersed between chapters which tend to summon the dark, enigmatic, distinctively impenetrable, insurgency of an enduring practitioner such as Hart Crane. It is also the perfect primer to the author and his inner workings alongside his neo-classic underground debut, Birds Do Sing.
