In The Corner of East and Dreams, Joan Connor’s sixth book, readers are intrepid travelers in the author’s fictional wilderness. At least half of the collection’s thirty stories are laced with fabulism, images and developments drawn from a deep well of allusion and myth. Connor’s prose is so precise and elegant, her fabulous fictional wilderness feels real. 

The collection’s lyrical title story opens with a quotation from Milan Kundera about remembering as a “form of forgetting.” The main character visits a palmist to relieve herself of a dream that has taken over her life. The palmist, at a loss, suggests the dreamer give up sleeping. As it turns out, the dreamer has lost not only her lover, a married man, but her memory: she “forgot about the pie, about the street, about his boots and cold coffee. Like pages, the days ripped them from the book of her memory. They kited off, somersaulted down streets and alleys in cities which she had never visited, cities which had no names.” This Kundera-esque anti-memory subverts her life. Neither the reader nor the character can really tell if what’s being described is a dream or something else: 

She felt as if she were falling horizontally through space and time. Her white dress froze in stiff pleats. Her hands marveled at the snow. Then she found the red thread of the dream […] Approaching, she wound the thread around her hands until, by the time she reached the red bed, it bound her hands, cut her hands. Bleeding. He was there, he was there from long ago. He was lying naked on the bed, his eyes pooling with the blue light that was himself. But she could not hug him because she had no hands […]

Connor’s is a multifaceted world of women who twist themselves into relationships with men. Often they do so at their peril. At least one woman, Eve, in “The Unnaming,” takes not only her own life into her hands, but all of creation, feminizing the book of Genesis by way of stripping from all things their names. For her, names are symbolic of domination by the one from whose rib this Eve, at least, did not find her beginnings. How fun to begin the story with “And they were not ashamed,” and to say, “the last word was Eve’s… It was not logos.”

“Tattoos” showcases Connor’s playful humor. The protagonist considers the man who is now her former lover’s boyfriend: “He isn’t supposed to drink. Liver problems, a bout with hepatitis. She thinks about saying something, but, hell, it’s not her liver. She’s not her brother’s keeper, not her former lover’s current lover’s liver keeper.” Her humor also shows up in “Baby, I’ll be Home for Halloween,” in which a man loses his lover to a doomsday cult that happens to give her more power and dignity than she ever had in the relationship. Connor’s women take their agency where they can.

If Connor’s humor is both pointed and poignant, her style is powerful and dextrous. She writes with muscled prose—and I did, as one Goodreads reader suggested: keep a dictionary handy. Her allusions are striking as well. In one story, a former boyfriend “slams his phone into the cradle endlessly rocking”—thank you, Walt Whitman. A quote from Thomas Wyatt’s “They flee from me that sometimes did me seek” informs the boyfriend’s lament, as he begs her to “come home” for Halloween. Like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, she gives him a midnight curfew, after which she, the cult princess, must return to her compound where she reinvents herself as “Warhead,” much to the beloved’s (and the reader’s) shock and awe.

Connor’s finely detailed, sensorially rich tableaus position the reader deeply in her stories.  In “The Painbroker,” which is a kind of “The Gift of the Magi” gone awry, a seamstress pawns her things to purchase gifts for her undeserving lover. The lover, a married man, has hired the seamstress to make a dress for his ill wife. The seamstress comes to the pawnbroker with a shawl “she wound around her against the fog.” The pawnbroker senses how precious the shawl is: “cashmere, from him, the one she sought to please.” As he senses her intention, to give up the shawl in order to procure something for her lover, a sinister and malevolent world opens up. The pawnbroker, with eyes “dimpled in his face like thumbholes in dough,” invites the seamstress to pawn her pain. He has his own harrowing history, which the seamstress perceives against the smells of “onion and damp rags” and the “kerosene from the guttering flame”—not any flame but one that gutters, one that you can both hear and smell.

In “Tenebrae” (yes, looked that up, too—part of a religious Christian service) a woman is deciding whether or not she should stay with a man. His parents come to visit, and when her lover suffers a loss, she has a revelation: “That his pain is so intolerable to me, that I take it as my own, tolerate it and know I love him.” While she feels sad “because his father will be absent on the day of our wedding,” her sadness carries a complexity, for she now understands “that loving is like tackling a railroad tie with a reciprocating butter knife.”

Grand and various interrogations of love, Connor’s stories trace its vagaries: love as unattainable, or attainable but questionable, or gone but seemingly within. Connor connects these philosophical questions to the visceral, the corporeal nature of bodies. In one story, Connor writes Delilah from the point of view of the severed lock of hair: “How could I know that being beloved, being the object of desire chops one off at the root?” In this way, the narrator discovers how ‘[l]ove conjures its own paradox […] After he answered her, she despised him. He was attainable. Love shuns its own weakness.”

Connor ranges over genres, from surreal fantasy to the western. One story features a cowgirl who loves sex. Another conjures the perfect man as Bigfoot, a “missing link” whom the narrator adores as her “ignoble savage.” But as he begins to “civilize,” she loses interest: “Begone, you benighted berry picker.” Reminiscent of fables and fairy tales, Connor’s stories evoke those of Angela Carter as well as another master storyteller, Edgar Allan Poe. Connor is also engaged with myth. For one story, she drew on an “early explanation of the world as balanced on the back of a turtle who stands on another turtle with turtles all the way down. That image of infinite regress,” she explains, “is linked to Aquinas’ the prime mover, proof of the existence of God—somewhere back in the string of causation there must be a primary mover […] I am trying to reverse the cosmogenetic myth.”

Whether or not her stories succeed in reversing, or bulldozing, the cosmogenetic myth, they continually prompt readers to reconsider their assumptions while taking them on a wild ride through an unforgettable universe.

+++

Joan Connor is the author of Here on Old Route 7, We Who Live Apart, History Lessons, The World Before Mirrors, and How to Stop Loving Someone. She is a former professor at Ohio University, the Stonecoast MFA program, and the Fairfield University MFA program. She lives in Vermont.

+

Geri Lipschultz’s writing has appeared in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., The New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing, Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II, and others. Her one-woman show was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr.