The book is just a city bereft of avenues but teeming with alleyways animated by bossy sky rats and the guys who yell, unbuttoned, into Nothing It's where we lose our minds a little, heady with cheap Chinese offered out of stainless caravans and woozy from the joint which once stabled the Framer's horses but…
Loft Story
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) shall we get our guns? our phone rings at least once a day and MA Bell gusts through us a Goliath in David's face if we shot Goliath might we put a slug in David? before he could roll across the room and end all of this for us? we…
Rolled Steel Elegy
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) prisoners at any expense and nothing on earth to be done she was the cause of our belonging our town cried the bitterest stream leaned back in its chair and saw that I was looking looking at its cleanliness and order, still the placid face across the stream the tumbled…
Our Night of Long Knives
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) we looked with cold eyes on the little men standing in our gardens and gravely offfered these phantoms every consideration and kindness on the opposite side of our little town doctors made their discoveries and shut the dark neighborhoods that had taken leave of their senses we believed ourselves perfect…
Craft Notes: Waste Not, Want Not
Years ago I took my first writing course, an undergraduate intro fiction offering taught by a high-strung, tenured loon whose own aspirations as a playwright had burned out along with his ability to comport himself civilly in social situations. His over-the-top insistence on a kind of Victorian propriety, combined with his inability to suppress his…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 