Reviews

Library Journal

The Village Voice

– Jim Dwyer, California State University Library, in Library Journal, 2006/07/01

Monson's debut collection is being published at the same time as his first
poetry book, Vacationland (Tupelo). Readers will note its intriguing
features: a table of contents identifying the main characters and thematic
keywords for each chapter/story, a detailed guide to and chart of the
characters and their relationships, interspersed electrical diagrams, and a
keyword index. This complex structure is just the icing on these
heartbreakingly poignant interconnected stories set in upper Michigan's
Keweenaw Peninsula, where ice and snow are characters in themselves. The
unnamed protagonist has suffered his mother's death, the loss of his father
to ham radio obsession, the rape and murder of a friend, and his girlfriend
Liz's accidental death. His thread is interwoven with tales of several
unsympathetic jerks whose perfidy ranges from hogging all the candy from a
piñata to dropping bowling balls on the freeway. Thankfully, the
protagonist, his armless brother, and Liz-three of the few sympathetic
characters-resurface to heighten their tragedies. This vibrant, poetic,
brilliantly original fiction is highly recommended for all public and
academic libraries.


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– Staff Reviewer, in The Village Voice, 2005/12/13

The fragments in Monson's Upper Peninsula epic assume in strange shapes: dream obituaries, annotated temperatures, incantations. The titles here would be at home on a Sufjan Stevens album ("We Are Going to See the Oracle of Apollo in Tapiola, Michigan"), and the two share a gift for oblique illumination. Winter has its own secret history, a frozen litany of vandalism, accident, and rue; "like milk in a bottle," the season's given shape in these pages. Crystallography and The Age of Wire and String are reference points, but Other Electricities locates an odd, exciting wavelength all its own.

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