Here, Skeet’s invasion of white space picks up where Eyes Bottle Dark left off and begins with the haunting image of a herd of 191 free-roaming horses found dead, thigh and neck-deep at a stock pond on the Navajo Nation, evaporated through extreme drought caused by “decades-long aggression by the United States and the changing climate”.
As if arriving fresh from the fever dream of her sensational memoir Drunk Mom Jowita Bydlowska sways toward us with a new tale, a different one, and on the first page she is as drunk as ever, but just as surefooted in her prose.
Covering the same sort of stark wasteland, both economic and emotional, Goldberg subverts expectations time and again by delineating a tangible humanity in the lost souls she describes.
As Nora, the protagonist of Robert G. Penner’s The Dark King Swallows the World points out early on, an empiricist “only believes what there’s evidence for. Things you can see with your own eyes,” and for much of my reading and writing life this has held true for me as both a consumer and a practitioner of fiction.
© 2025| THE Miramichi Reader
