Jennifer Firestone's Story Has a Peculiar Past Tense

Nasim Luczaj reviews Jennifer Firestone's book, Story (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), "a hybrid take on questions of narrative composed primarily of single lines of poetry," for SPAM zine. More:

We don’t start off in the present tense; the text makes languorous moves from the past towards present, offering up variant sentences like a sea handing out waves birthed by shifted winds. The very first line reads: ‘A beach at midday in a foreign land read as a good beginning’. Despite the default primacy of the past tense in literature, it’s so easy to slip into reading this ‘read’ as reads, as if anticipating that the text will settle on the present tense. Unless we are learning to read or incredibly tired, reading always manages to happen before we’ve clocked it has. A story tends to happen before we tell it. Then again, a reader’s mental action that brings the story about in them is necessarily real-time, while the space enacted lies arguably outside of time. Tense is almost an add-on or afterthought. In Story, the peculiarity of the past tense that I’ve just outlined is conjured with a single, fantastically minuscule gesture.

In this text, such admirable precision in suggestiveness can be observed again and again. There are lots of clues as to what might be happening in the story, but I was much more interested in the act of letting some breadcrumbs fall — while making sure the others never see path — itself. Trauma is deliberately named – named as a preference, as what we seek in films and stories, what we need to be engaging with. However, I must admit that the importance of the unspecified trauma looming over the text washed over me completely on the first reading, which, to me, was more of a sitting with sentences, a serious attempt at holidaymaking from the world into the coordinates of beach-couple-sea. I felt fully fulfilled by this almost abstract register. It was both frightening and educational to come back to Story and notice how willingly I’d given myself to an erasure and focused on the allure of sweepingly concrete style…

Read on at SPAM zine.