Blood Fire Vapor Smoke - Softcover

Ray, Shann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1950730182 ISBN 13: 9781950730186

Publisher: Unsolicited Press, 2020

Synopsis

A cycle akin to the seasons of a life, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke asks questions of the ancient struggle between life and death amidst landscapes new and old. Does ultimate forgiveness answer to ultimate violence in the world? What is the nature of grace? Who determines the fates that move us? A collection of stories opening upon the inner world with the abandon and gravity involved in personal and collective responsibility, the book responds to the present age of enragement, and the collapsing binary of two hungers: violence and forgiveness. Blood Fire Vapor Smoke considers the human myth of regeneration through violence, and the aftermath of loneliness, love, and yearning found in a more merciful expression of human existence. Violence is caught by love, and changed, transcended, and transformed into a yearning for restoration, atonement, and the fusion embodied in the true power of community, humility, and greater humanity. The characters in each of the four sections of this collection of stories and one long poem, pass through thresholds of knowledge and responsibility. Asking not what life owes them, but what they may receive from life, and in the end, just how they are responsible for life, those who people this collection cross into unforeseen places of mystery, mercy, and grace.

In Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, beyond our inevitable compulsions toward violent ends, healing calls, beckoning us toward a crossroads where we turn and face one another, finding the beauty and strength to serve and love one another again.

About this title

About the Author

Poet, short story writer, and novelist Shann Ray grew up in Montana and Alaska and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. His work has been featured in Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, Big Sky Journal, Narrative, and Salon. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and winner of the American Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, he is the author of American Masculine, American Copper, Atomic Theory 432, Balefire, Sweetclover, and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity. A clinical psychologist specializing in the psychology of men, he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. Because of his wife and three daughters, he believes in love.

Review

Ray is a versatile writer, delving into a deeply personal drama in a foreign setting and returning home to Montana, to write about the intimacy of love and marriage. A man of the rugged landscape marries a ballerina and experiences mutual love for the first time. It's a story of the heartbreak of infidelity, complex emotions and healing. Literature is full of similar stories. What's special here is the precision of the writing, the pain on the page. "Before her, he'd loved women, but they had not loved him... he'd always walked with his head bowed, his massive shoulders bent inward as if to protect and shield his heart."

Mindy Cameron of the Inlander

"The beauty of the language, the collection's historical range, and Ray's reach for--sometimes prayer for--mercy and compassion in the face of horrific violence, his insistence on the solace of beauty, make this a brave and worthy book of stories. It feels restless, not just because it moves among different physical settings, but because it moves from what can read as historical fiction to an intimate and contemporary mode, and because Ray works to see a driving masculinity prismatically. This restlessness, the unwillingness to conceive of a singular answer to the question of what nourishes the appetite for violence--in the kitchen, in theatres of war, in alleyways in ravaged cities--across the centuries and across continents, is true and inventive. The collection feels like a genuine inquiry in which salvation and damnation, wickedness and blessedness merge... a hard book to write, hard won, and risky."

Noy Holland

Edition details

• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Publication date: 2020
• ISBN 10: 1950730182
• ISBN 13: 9781950730186
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 208