Treehouse

Kyle Minor

1. “Cataclysm Baby,” by Matt Bell – An apocalyptic abecedarium that is one part baby name registry, one part S. Thompson’s Index of Folk-Motifs, one part Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. It might also be effective birth control, if Uncle Sam has taken away all your other options.
2. “Against Specificity,” by Douglas Watson – “The trouble: You want Thing A but are stuck with Thing B.”
3. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” by Sara Faye Leiber – Bedbugs, body, books, Bohemia.
4. Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, by Danielle Evans – Eight stories sure to bust up your heart.
5. One Perfect Bird: Poems, by Letitia Trent – The poems in One Perfect Bird ride like a dirty living letter in a good, clean envelope. They are the silty Tang in our cups, the color of the hunters’ vests like ribbons through the birches as they searched our forest for any rusty bursts of blood. They are primarily poltergeists; mesh net masks and subtly singing beards, bee bodies slipping from their chins like honey. If it’s true that I lifted all these lines of praise from the lines in Letitia Trent’s poems—and it is true—then who could blame me? For the lyricism required to describe them, I can’t better their maker. No one could.

Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory, a collection of stories. Recent work appears in Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2008. Follow him on Twitter.