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Broken Accidents

by Phlip Arima

In this collection of punchy short-short stories, performance poet Phlip Arima delivers a quirky mix: dark satire of our preoccupation with convenience, consumerism, and convention; surreal journeys into the subconscious; and confounding dialogues.

When they work, the satires convey lucid descriptions of human behaviour sprinkled with startling humour, often through the eyes of a naive storyteller. In “All the Same,” an even-toned narrator describes a medium-sized city where everyone is law-abiding and cuts their lawn regularly. Without changing tone he tells us that, by the way, the mothers all sneak off to sleep with the sons, and the fathers are addicted to pornography. In “My Decisions,” the narrator explains how he put his mother down because she’d not been feeling well, and, realizing his dad would then need more attention, says: “Not my idea of a good time, thank-you-very-much. So I had him put down too.”

In the second half, and in the six stories that are printed vertically in the margins of the other stories, Arima’s style moves toward meditations. In imagery and narrative voice, these stories resemble most the manner in which a friend might relate a dream to you. The stories are full of long hallways, transforming objects, doors that can’t be opened, and keys that don’t work – the makings of recurring nightmares. Unfortunately, like most recurring dreams, the stories get stuck in obsessively repetitive cycles and are monotonous in tone.

There is trouble, too, with the handful of dialogue stories, most of them rapid-fire negotiations between two people resolving some matter, such as how to open a can of soup or exit a subway car. Thwarted and circular, they evoke the question games in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Waiting for Godot. However, the metaphors in Arima’s dialogues have difficulty blossoming into philosophical queries and so linger at the level of trivial bickering.

Broken Accidents is most pleasurable when Arima’s lyrical talent comes through with unique imagery and faultless rhythm: “I’m a bit of debris the size of a fingernail hitting a satellite as it circles the earth. I’m a sponge in the ocean waiting for a wave. The shore is more than a lifetime away.”

 

Reviewer: Micah Toub

Publisher: Insomniac Press

DETAILS

Price: $11.95

Page Count: 168 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-895837-21-9

Issue Date: 2003-4

Categories: Fiction: Short

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