What Passes for Love

Louise E. Allin, a poet and short-story writer, is also an English instructor at Cambrian College.

What passes for love surpasses understanding, as Stan Rogal very well
knows. Rogal’s characters—a mysterious girl appearing yearly at the
door in the guise of a stranger in “a taste of apricots,” or a
nameless couple exchanging points of view as they dance around each
other in a stalking version of “the ant game”—perform in truncated
moments, clipped conversations in the shadows between reality and
dreams. Does a wife really wake up Kakfa-style bearing the leg of
another person, her husband sleeping with a gun under his pillow
awaiting the moment the rest of her parts leave town? The stories are
complimented by naturalistic illustrations—a woman with a toaster in
her lap, a dog with its muzzle in a can, and an alienated figure behind
a window.

This collection is strong stuff, not for the uninitiated—Burroughs
instead of Lucy Maud, the tang of musk over sweet talcum. Rogal offers
no easy answers; yet may we all be satisfied in these disturbing times
with what passes for love.