Today I Am A Book

Today I ate this book. I devoured this unstoppable book. It got into all those places that stopped the world outside and tsunamied my interior! xTx is fierce and reaches in and doesn't let go! I had to remember to keep breathing while reading. It made me feel all of those unreachables of childhood that ache! That murky bottomless pit that she paints on the page so intricately!"But in this summer field I have you. And your arms have only carried me out of the corn. And your mouth has never told promises of finding secrets. And when they command, "Show me on the doll where he touched you," you will take that doll, you will touch that doll everywhere he did not. With that action, forecasting a new weather. You will hand me the doll, a gift. The chaste and unspoiled doll. We will bury it in me. The soil will accept it and my field will sing a different childhood song."Thank you, xTx, for your brave, unleashed work! It has the capacity to change people. It changed me! xooxxo

Today I am a fan of xTx. This is a book of 30 something really short stories, most about 2 pages long. I likes some of them and I loved some of them. They span a broad range from sad, funny, and grotesque. xTx is obviously gifted with the words, and I know this is a matter of personal taste on my part but when I read very short stories like this I just want more longer detailed stories. I felt the same way reading this book that I did when I read Chris Deal's Incarnations. The stories are so well written and engaging that i start getting absorbed into the story and it's over!Anyways CCM always puts out good stuff that challenges the "rules" of conventional Lit which is why I read there books. I will definitely read more xTx. I don't read that much flash fiction but I would come back to this authors but I would also be really excited if she wrote something in longer form.There are many quotable lines in this book but I think this is my favorite: "Reality is weighted , heavy. It is an anvil tied to the all of you, pulling you down. Extra gravity. At night it turns to locusts. A tiny, swarm with equal heft. They nest inside the mind. They are a wriggling, restless mass. They don't let you sleep."

book of the year.

Today I write a book review and that book review says: BUY THIS BOOK

Today I am a book review. I am clumsily attempting to convey the feeling the reader gets when exploring the dark and satirical subjects of this collection. What I'd really like to do is explain how well the author taps her own feelings and emotions into a variety of different avatars, people and things of what she is both completely unfamiliar with and yet extremely intimate. Then something would be included about how the author doesn't shy away from the grotesque of everyday life, and lays it bear along with herself in her writing. The result is a collection that is relatable but fantastic, grim but hopeful. It would be best to find a way to say this without including so many contradictions, but maybe I think that whoever reads this review will know what I mean. They will identify the contradictions in their own lives and find the pain of these stories within themselves. They will experience that brief connection and the author will end it, snuff out the micro-universe of the story and show the reader exactly what they lost. A good book review would probably have a snappy ending, something that would make you add it to your online shopping wish list as soon as it was over. This review, though, can only do so much. It could never be the book. It can only be the review. It hopes that the people reading it will never guess the truth; that it actually is nothing like the book at all.

Today I Am a Book is a collection of darkly comic vignettes (flash fictions/prose poems) highlighting wives, farmers, short order cooks, genies, hunchbacks, basketball coaches, babysitters, failures, lions, time machines, and s***** tattoos, written by the phantom queen of darkly comic vignettes (flash fictions/prose poems) highlighting… Today I totally recommend this book. of this review @[...] Read more

I discovered xTx when one of her stories came up in discussion during a writing course. I grabbed up her NORMALLY SPECIAL collection and have looked forward to TODAY I AM A BOOK since. Her work gives me all sorts of crazy feels and I crave them. Sometimes it's like a sprained tooth with an ache radiating where I didn't know I could feel. Sometimes it is a dagger lodged where I feel the most. Sometimes it is the warmth of sunshine on the face. Sometimes it is a plunge off the end of the dock into frigid water.Read this book and find out what today feels like.