Scattershot: Collected Fictions

—This bomb-ass, brilliant book is, without question, as serious as a heart attack. The storyworld of REAL survival: Amy Eggert is the only person I know brave enough, badd enuff, to go there. Aiming to challenge—and more than likely, shatter—widespread myth and that which has been cataclysmic in our society like no other fiction I’ve read, Scattershot is the true language of trauma. It never stops talking to you, getting into your head in ways that you’ll never forget. Far-reaching, Scattershot will utterly blow you away. It’s that good—Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding —Written with a compressed precision, the short stories and prose poems that make up Scattershot are like the random yet deadly pattern produced by a haphazardly fired shotgun: painful, contingent, indelible. Equally poised between quiet empathy and unflinching candor, these are snapshots of everyday life in a neoliberal America that has given up on its social contract and the promise of the better life. What remains is a haunted landscape of broken dreams, broken bodies, and broken minds. Amy Eggert is a poet of our diminished world, and Scattershot is necessary reading— Christopher Breu, author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics and Hard-Boiled Masculinities —Amy Eggert’s Scattershot must be what Cathy Caruth meant by “the story of a wound that cries out.” Only here are many wounds growing mouths, yearning to be heard—the grandfather in the assisted living facility crying “this isn’t home,” the four year old son flashing back to his father’s hallway suicide, a woman who pines for ghost babies lost in trees. These stories, in their unflinching exquisiteness, are a live nerve twitching, the body at its limits demanding witness. Eggert’s debut collection is the body almost choking on its own vulnerable song— Sara Henning, author of A Sweeter Water