Before I go into detail about Ben Somers’s excellent manipulation of the simple and complex sentence, I would like to say a few words about the way in which this chapbook arrived on my doorstep (by doorstep I mean the PO Box located several miles away from my door). I ordered Somers’s chapbook from Lame House Press around midnight on a Friday, and the book reached me on the following Monday (an arrival time that must have broken some sort of postal service record).  When I extracted the book from its sealed package, I was surprised to find a hand-written note attached. The note, written on a piece of green card stock in a curly cursive script, thanked me personally for purchasing the chapbook and wished me well in the coming year. I was impressed.

This good impression didn’t end with the note. The cover of Your Sorcerer’s Way is a mountain inscribed with a pentagram, encircled by lightning and footed with a mouth devouring some sort of kudzu-esque plant. This image gives you a good idea of the realm that Somers has created with each of these prose poems. Throughout the work there are dangling images that push you to expand your inner vision like “lilac carpools,” “molten shame,” “ear trumpets,” and “gut rot”.  Somers’s well-placed line breaks in each of these prose poems draw your eye to these odd couplings that completely complicate many otherwise simple sentences.

Though most of the pieces in Your Sorcerer’s Way seem to exist on a more fantastical plane, there is also a sprinkling of ironic 80’s references throughout. Two of my favorite pieces in the collection are filled with acid wash whimsy.  The first, “80’s Pop Radio or, How I Made It Through,” is almost word-for-word Mr. Mister’s overly-dramatic hit “Take These Broken Wings”.  The twist at the end gives this laughable song an honest twinge of sadness. The second, “Power Outage or, The Happiest of Birthdays,” is a definite nod (or at least a wink) to John Hughes. The piece fills my head with images of an aging Jake Ryan and Sam Baker celebrating a birthday that doesn’t mark any major or minor milestone.

All in all, Your Sorcerer’s Way is a work of remembering and imagining. It is a piece that centers on the adult’s attempt to understand and escape reality, and, by the end, you feel as though you have flipped through a photo book of pictures you never knew you took.

Shea Stripling dabbles in flash fiction, prose poetry, short shorts and all other synonyms of this singular idea. Her work has been compared to “things written on the walls of middle school bathroom stalls” and “the verbalization of cats meowing.” She likes to think that she writes like George Saunders or Bruno Shulz but has been informed, on multiple occasions, that this is “completely and utterly false.” Her life can be described as a series of scenes from various sitcoms that has been pasted together in a disorderly fashion. She plans to one day win an award and write about it in her bio paragraph.