Prose Poems with Grit
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Darling Endangered: Lyrical Short Fiction
by Carol Guess
Brooklyn Arts Press.  80 pages, $14.95

IF YOU’VE EVER SPENT an afternoon lost in a museum, taking in new and unfamiliar works, then at dinner mistaken your fork for sculpture or the sound of cab tires on wet pavement for angel song, you are well prepared for the enchantments of Darling Endangered. Carol Guess weaves impressionist glimpses of character, tuneful poetics, and details ripe with working-class grit together into prose poems most of which are under one hundred words long. But however innocent these short pieces look on the page, they have a way of unseating a reader’s assumptions about fiction, poetry, and language itself.