Shattered Fossils
“‘Too romantic,’ you’ve called her poetry. ‘Too much drama.’ My editorializing – your words were scathing – lancing Araceli, as she roamed the rooms of your Chelsea. But you would remain in your study, among your books of old heroes, attending to shattered fossils.”
Published by Guernica Editions
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Shattered Fossils is a collection of stories about characters trying to find a place for both the horror and the beauty in their lives. The measure of hope that each character finds becomes a song that echoes beyond the grave. This selection of narratives about historians, musicians, parliamentarians, chemists, non-human persons, dreamers and ghosts plumbs the depths to unearth the enduring shards of their tales…their shattered fossils.
“In Shattered Fossils, Sharon Lax has created a complex bricolage of music, visual art, poetry, and scientific knowledge to show readers that, even in our moments of grief, insecurity, secrecy, and pain, we are always connected to beauty, and to one another, through complex webs of cultural meaning. Her stories, erudite and ecstatic and sometimes ekphrastic, carry readers across dreamscapes to sites of mourning, scenes of crime, and wellsprings of shifting memories; each should be savored for the intellectual flourishes and bursts of poetry from an author whose creative powers are on full display.”
“These are captivating, erudite stories written in beautifully textured imagistic prose. The characters are complex and well-delineated; the settings are unforgettable and inseparable from the characters’ drama.”
“When the world’s pouring in,” a character asks in Sharon Lax’s Shattered Fossils, “what would you do?” It’s a question that echoes through these intense stories – stories haunted by the past, haunted too by the pain of other living creatures. The troubled relationships at the heart of Lax’s work compel a glittering awareness of how we strive to make something beautiful from the strangeness of our lives.