REVIEW

Over the course of sixteen flash and micro fictions, Cheryl Pappas’s The Clarity of Hunger offers a masterful meditation on hunger and the myriad emotions it evokes.

 

Pappas’s characters want so much—love, safety, existence, money, contentment, revenge, oblivion, satisfaction. Yet, this collection is not about the mere advent of their hunger. Pappas weaves us in and out, over and through emotional landscapes. Fairy tales. Surreal situations. Fabulist moments. Defamiliarized locations. Pappas deftly disarms us, opening our senses to worlds where stories flourish, but plot does not compel our thoughts as much as image, language, and sensation. A king fantasizes about tulips while a serpentine beast devours him. A grocery store stocks shelves with money instead of food. A woman builds a mud home daily, only to have it decay each evening. We are unmoored; we are transported.

 

The story “Tending the Elephant” is equal parts earnest narrative and cheeky metaphor. A husband and wife tend to a circus elephant. The animal is so big, we’re to understand, that it takes all day to scrub it down. The wife takes one side, the husband the other, each working steadily, enjoying the day. They are content. And yet, the elephant in the room: The couple never spends face-to-face time together. A happy marriage or a resigned one? We’re attuned to such questions, but the narrative pushes the inquiry further—if what you hunger for is pleasant days, does the answer actually matter? Pappas’s prose is chock-a-block with such ponderings, and her images—the giant, sudsy elephant, the great snake-beast evolving in the castle basement—stick with the reader long after her stories are through.

 

This collection skates the line between prose and poetry while also playing brilliantly with form. Pappas treats us to several hermit crab fictions. “Profile” takes the shape of a personal ad while “Hunger” offers a series of math problems. The final piece, “Homework,” turns the transition from life to death into a pop quiz, asking: What is the end of your life? The piece offers eight multiple-choice answers, but no option can be confidently ruled out. This is the point, Pappas suggests, because “clarity” does not necessitate concrete understanding. And truly, The Clarity of Hunger is not a book about definitive answers. Rather, this collection considers the contours of longing. Its quality. The experience of hunger, not to solve it, but as a chance to touch the stuff that mills about our unconscious, the emotions that are so tricky to label and even harder to exhume.

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Book Details

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The Clarity of Hunger can be purchased here. 

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Published by Word West. The volume is 5”x 8” and comprises 43 pages, including acknowledgements. The striking, atmospheric cover features the photography of Marcos Araujo and was designed by Julia Alvarez and David Byron Queen.

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