Review of Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit

I’ve been thinking a bit about how disposable most flash fictions are. While the percentage of slop to gold is probably no greater than that found in any other literary form, the sheer volume of short shorts, microfictions, or whatever you want to call them, and the ease in which some people and magazines churn them out, make it seem like there’s just so much more terrible examples than there are good. So it’s great to have discovered Joseph Young, who, with Easter Rabbit has, along with individual stylists like Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, Kim Chinquee, and a handful of others,  defined himself as a singularity. Check out my review of Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit HERE. An excerpt:

With their directness and precision, their attention to what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” Joseph Young’s microfictions might be mistaken for Imagist poems, but with their shift away from showing “things” as “things” toward “things” as something else, or, rather, toward portraying both the “thingness” of the thing and of some different “thing,” his miniatures suggest something altogether different. But where they fit is less important than what they do, how they make you feel. In Easter Rabbit’s miniatures, its sharp sentences focused on often mundane details, Young offers epics. Seemingly channeling William Blake, he offers further “auguries of innocence,” further testaments to worlds in granules, heavens in flowers, and – well, suffice to say, these are sentences to linger over.