REQUIEM

Fiction. REQUIEM by Teresa Carmody is a "folk opera, a lament for the unexamined life," writes editor and author David Ulin in his Introduction. In this short collection of fiction, a lonely man plainchants for the waitress he once stalked, a sonless father serenades a fatherless son, and a bereft family gathers to bury a parent, providing an aching chorus of what is left. Carmody uses Biblical language to pierce the callous and bruised souls of these lost, and sometimes found, small-town Michiganders. In her raw spare stories, Carmody creates, says novelist, essayist and poet Carol Muske-Dukes, "a voice out of the backyard burning bush, a Midwest scriptural mist: frank, fierce and fidgety, and most emphatically her own."