Bittersweet Christmas

by

L.D. Clark

L. D. Clark has done remarkable work in his newest tale. He's given us a fast-paced narrative through a world that's rich with textures. Everything here is vivid: the characters, the land, the weather -- even the different turns of theology that have marked the Southern and Southwestern sensibilities. In terms of events and language, Bittersweet Christmas is finely layered and stirring from beginning to end.

James Hoggard, poet, novelist and translator, whose books include Patterns of Illusion, Trotter Ross, and Medea in Taos

Clark weaves a haunting tapestry of tragedy as old as Cain and of counterbalancing rites of passage, for both the young narrator and his community, that enable humans to cope with the paradoxes of our existence. Especially moving is the woman in the long black veil, who spreads it in an immemorial gesture over the star-crossed victims of the tragedy, even as she marks the passage to new twins, new life -- vexed as always, but embracing.

Doug Canfield, poet and critic, author of Violence and the Secular, and Mavericks on the Border

Christmas, an apparition, a funeral, a woman in black. This coming-of-age story, set in Depression-era rural Texas, manages at once to conjure a past long gone and a fallible humanity always tragically present.

David Breeden, poet and novelist, author of Surviving the Coup, Artistas, and Another Number

Ibsn: 1-891386-36-0, 104 pages, $14.95