Beginning With the Mirror

Jean Genet stated: "Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity." A few strange facts within this book, the latest collection by Shirley Jackson award finalist, Peter Dubé, are: the heat within a boy or a man can be muscular, be with purpose, be all consuming; mobs become consuming entities, shifting and hungry and with no humane intention despite being once composed of humanity; poets and actresses and students are words and words have power and resonance and walk on two legs and sometimes soar but more often haunt; and we can never forget that memories batter and wound, their shape defined like a blade or reflective like a silver-backed mirror. Dubé's short stories are eerie and fantastical and chip away at the known world until there are wide cracks that reveal many a strange fact to all of us at once.