This Here's A Merica

With This Here's a Merica, L. D. Brodsky reprises his auto-factory-assembly-line worker from south St. Louis, first introduced in Yellow Bricks and Catchin' the Drift o' the Draft. In one of the six pieces that bind the collection, this lovable redneck, who takes the English language all the way back to its murky origins, hosts a "Stupor Bowl Tailgate Key Party," in which he and his three buddies know the score of the game even before it starts and what trophies they'll win: the house keys and wives they swap for the night. We also join him on his extended "lunch break" from the car plant to a "sportin' bar" on the East Side, where Julie No-Name, between performances, indulges him in an "afternoon delight." Other characters jump from the pages as well, including a Vietnam vet, now a doorman, who finds himself transported back to the war whenever it rains, shooting wildly at passing cars with his umbrella as he escorts residents to and from their apartment building. In a postmodern examination of the writing process itself, Brodsky chronicles the rise of another intriguing individual — a sous-chef who begins his career at a fowl facility, rendering chicken parts into words, and eventually becomes the toast of Manhattan for transforming gizzards into Petrarchan sonnets, necks into short stories. These unique protagonists, and the others in this volume's forty-two fast-paced fictions, lead the reader through a house of mirrors in which everyday reality is twisted in ways magically satirical and absurdly surreal. Their distorted reflections, which become strikingly familiar to us as we recognize our own afflictions and foibles in them, hover in the subconscious long after This Here's a Merica is closed.