Literary

Peach Picks: Literary News and Reviews

by / Aug. 9, 2017 12am EST

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

ON PEACH​: 

If you missed June Gehringer, or @unloveablehottie, at our last Episode, you missed hearing funny and poignant moments from her life in concise and beautiful poems about love, loss, family, and identity. Yesterday at Peach, we published three of Gehringer’s poems that are similarly brief, but teeming with meaning. The third poem, “I get so jealous of euthanized dogs,” is the longest, at just seven lines, and is a dreamy look back at lost love and death. She writes, “i walk around all day/ thinking: i’m going to die/ in the universe/ you loved me in.” Gehringer’s expertise lies in how she packs a punch in such short vignettes.

IN PRINT​:

“A Love Story” from ​The Dark, Dark​ by Samantha Hunt Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Samantha Hunt’s collection of short stories The Dark, Dark was released to rave reviews all around, and I can’t say that I disagree. In particular, “A Love Story” really stuck with me and I have been thinking about it nonstop since. Within pages, Hunt explores identity, motherhood, marriage, aging, and family in the most honest way. She describes herself, her husband, and children sharing a bed: “Those nights, our giant bed is the center of the universe, the mother ship of bacterial culture, populated with blood, breast milk, baby urine. A petri dish of life-forms.” Within the story itself, the female narrator is struggling with her own experiences with motherhood and marriage and her realization that she is losing her identity in motherhood and trying to cope with the fact that her new identity is that of the “mother.” Along with this, she ponders over reasons she and her husband have stopped being intimate, and why she is always concerned about her children’s well-being, all while a predator (animal or human) may be lurking outside of her home in the dark.

IN PRINT​:

Dear Cyborgs: A Novel​ by Eugene Lim Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (2017)

Initially, I picked up Eugene Lim’s recently published Dear Cyborgs as a palette cleanser after giving up on muddling through the meandering intrigue of an 19th-century door-stopper which will remain nameless. Lim’s short novel turned out to be one of the best things I read this year. Ostensibly about teenage friendship and superheroes, it is turned out to be a meditation on the possibilities and limits of resistance, artistic and otherwise, post Occupy Wall Street. It’s a shame it was so short, I wanted it to be as long as that door-stopper I kept wanting to throw against the wall.


“Peach Picks” is a column of literary news and recommendations written by the editors of Peach Mag, an online literary magazine based in Buffalo. For inquiries, contact the editors at peachmgzn@gmail.com.

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