REVIEW of Maria S. Picone's This Tenuous Atmosphere
Plus Five Questions with the author!
WHAT’S HAPPENING
This linked collection of speculative flash fictions begins in a liminal moment: A Korean mother cannot keep her child. She decides to fashion a spaceship out of her baby’s placenta and launch the infant to the Great and Beautiful, where ghost men wait to claim her. Asia, as the ghost men dub her, quickly grows into an adult spaceship-human hybrid who's a dutiful minion of capitalism, fueled on a never-ending supply of Coke. She spends thankless days laboring to buy relevance in a country that continually devalues and alienates her. As the faux promise of the Great and Beautiful grinds, Asia longs for her family and the life in Korea she was severed from. We follow her cosmic journey as she searches for her parents and beyond—for herself.
WHAT WE LOVE
Picone is a master of figurative language. Her ability to craft a metaphor out of a placenta and fuel it with a never-ending supply of soda is simply unparalleled. Her poetry roots show in all aspects of her prose, which is lyric yet direct. Sparse yet generous. Sharp and smart. Picone deftly leavens weighty topics with satire and wit—her critiques of American capitalism are simply delicious—and excavates deeply felt emotion from her characters with narrative tenderness and often whimsy. To wit, when Asia finally finds her father living on the moon, the reader cannot help but delight in Picone’s play with cultural tropes as we learn that Father regularly plays poker with moon rabbits and knows all the spots where the moon tastes most like cheese. Such thoughtfully rendered elements combine to create a canvas for the reader to explore their own understanding of modernity, identity, and belonging. A must-read.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“Don’t be better than the others, but be better, but appear not to be better, but appear to be better, but appear to not know that you are better.” (a work performance review)
“She told me waiting was a thing you do when you have hope, that she could not wait for me because she didn’t have the knowing of how to wait.” (upon Asia meeting her mother)
“Father did not know how to be a ship. It was mother’s heart that was vessel, always looking at how to propel itself forward.”
“A ghost needs no fuel beyond the memory of what had been.”
BOOK DETAILS
This Tenuous Atmosphere can be purchased here.
Published by Conium Press. The volume is 7”x 4.3” and is 55 pages long with acknowledgements. The book has a wonderfully smooth cover and is a pleasure to hold.
FIVE QUESTIONS WITH MARIA S. PICONE
This book reads like a novelette--a full journey--and its flash sensibility beautifully underscores the narrator’s sense of fragmentation. How did this book come to be? Did you start with a few flash pieces and build out from there, or did you start with a sense of the whole?
I wrote the very first piece and knew instantly it could be the Start of Something. The idea of a hopeless twisting of body, identity, and place such that it was recognizable within the warping appealed to me.
If you look closely, the chapbook is also the start of something: what happens to the protagonist when she’s resolved her past history and created identity within herself? What lies really and truly beyond the borders we’ve set?
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This book is a family saga that interrogates transracial, international adoption, immigration policy, whiteness, alienation/otherness, late-stage capitalism, corporate culture, and consumerism. Yet, at its core, it’s a work of Sci-Fi. How do you see this genre as a gateway to satire and your themes?
I could say so much on this, but I'll leave it at: where else can things be so topsy-turvy and yet so very familiar?
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Your writing is satirical and deliciously snarky, yet also earnest and profoundly open-hearted. How do you think about tone and balance in your work?
I take my cue from classical music and dance; you can only do the same step for so long. I so often see pieces in the queue that are clever and lose their luster when they don’t go anywhere or mean anything. I’m not saying you need to be moral and/or sappy like the third act of a comedy movie, but without a change in tone you’ll lose the audience somewhere.
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What are you working on now? What’s holding your interest?
Shockingly, a romance-adjacent novella exploring two central questions: in the year of our cosmic poodle 2026, can people from different sides of the political divide unite? And if so, is it horribly hypocritical? Of whom?
Second, what happens when happy-ever-after isn’t good enough, because we exist in a patriarchy where men are still inculcated to push invisible labor onto women, but the old ‘traditional’ bargain (which almost never worked, or only functioned well for a certain class and race of people) of protection and providing versus house- and child-keeping has broken down, and both people need to work? What is the function of a ‘woman’ and a ‘man’ within that framework? Where does compromise become sacrifice?
This is a “the standard is in the ground” examination, all set in a Hallmark-style small town—which is also an Orange Man small town. And hopefully not my own personal Lucrezia Floriani moment.
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We are thrilled to have featured your work before. In your Claudine CNF piece, “Am I Being Punished,” you reference Hello Kitty accessories. We’re big Hello Kitty fans. What is your favorite character? (Our staff adores Kerropi.)
Too funny! I just made the agonizing decision between a ballet pink and a denim blue Hello Kitty duffel bag. I loved going to this store called The Paper Shop when I was a kid, and begging my parents for Hello Kitty and Lisa Frank folders, cute pencils, and other bright, shiny, branded writing hoopla. So I’d say OG Hello Kitty. I have my eye on a traditional kimono Hello Kitty maneki neko from Musubi Kiln. Ahh, product placement.
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BIO
Maria S. Picone/수영is a queer Korean American adoptee who has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Reckoning, and others, including Best Small Fictions 2021. She won Salamander’s Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Prize, Cream City Review’s 2020 Poetry Prize, and support from Kenyon Review, Juniper, Tin House, Hambidge, The Watering Hole, South Carolina Arts Commission, South Arts, and elsewhere. She edits at Chestnut Review, Five Minutes, and Foglifter. Find her at mariaspicone.com.
OTHER BOOKS
Adoptee Song (Game Over Books)
Anti Asian Bias (Game Over Books)
SOCIAL MEDIA
Bluesky: @mspicone
Instagram: @mspicone