Friends Coming Back as Animals

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

Poet John Weier gives this collection of 20 stories a level of
abstraction, a disjointedness, and a quirky tempo that might not appeal
to all. His characters seem to blunder about in confusion, with the
world and with each other. Often they don’t want to get out of bed, or
they try to get someone to join them under the fetid covers. Existential
in nature, but learning nothing from their whimpers, the stories end
much as they begin.

Some stories sound like fables: “Deacon Wiebe was really quite an
ordinary man. He was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, neither more
nor less happy than other men.” Even “The Man Who Lived by the
River,” a tale of a young boy going to Vietnam, lacks verisimilitude,
as if details such as rice paddies, shrapnel, and the Mekong had been
seen on a newscast. “Life and Death in Texas” introduces a different
person in each paragraph, their lives unconnected. Nice details,
interesting incidents—but to what purpose? A series of obituaries in
prose poems? Spoon River Anthology did it better.