Bruising Indirection

Our story begins with a gift of love to make you gag. A "hunter husband" kills and skins a squirrel, then puts it "in the Crock-Pot," so that his unsuspecting wife discovers "the pink body curled like a fetus." A disturbing start, and it prompts a disturbing association, a few lines further along. The story's narrator wife (a different wife) is revealed to be carrying a fetus herself. When she tells her husband she smells something in the walls, perhaps a dead squirrel, he reflects that "pregnant women had an enhanced sense of smell."

Bruising indirection like that characterizes the best of The Physics of Imaginary Objects, Tina May Hall's first collection, and the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Indeed, "Visitations," the collection's opener, sets ups up a number of its defining elements. "Visitations" takes an unsettled central relationship and disturbs it further, so that husband and wife finally abandon their home and its fetor, and despite her pregnancy, they start "snowshoeing" to a neighbor's place miles off, in "air...so cold the trees cracked." Does the solution seem extreme, when the problem's so small? Well, deal with it—such are the laws of Hall's Physics. Typical too are the rustic setting and primitive ways, the stuff of Grimm Brothers, in a life that's otherwise contemporary. The husband flies off to conferences, and the wife uses maxi-pads. The University of Pittsburgh cover design proves apropos, situating a fairy-tale woods and mirror in an up-to-the-minute arrangement.

And if "Visitations" establishes authorial patterns, not to say obsessions, the crucial one would be the ambivalence of the story's conclusion. The night may be freezing, the woods threatening, but the unnamed wife on her snowshoes finds herself serene, dreaming of "so many things inside us... curled up, content." These Imaginary Objects arrive, repeatedly, at such unlikely affirmations. Indeed, the novella-length closer, "All the Day's Sad Stories" (also the '08 winner of the Caketrain Chapbook Competition), reads like a more ambitious recasting of the materials from the first piece. Again the question of pregnancy looms before a couple as a test for their relationship, a test further defined by the season and the garden. Even the wife's near-adultery takes place out in the country, it seems inspired by a river "fat from the spring melt," and the illicit kiss is visited by a woodland apparition. "Something that might be a dead animal floats by, a mass of hair and skin."

The juxtaposition packs a bit of punch, to be sure, but the most haunting imaginations do more than invoke a few animistic spirits. Summoning the Manitou won't, by itself, bring the woods to life. So Physics may begin and end impressively, hewing young love's uncertainty into chainsaw totems, but Hall accomplishes less in those pieces that work like an echo chamber of folktale resonance. "Kick" opposes images of wasps hatching and kites taking off, but neither flight carries much emotional cargo. Then there's "By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her," which piles on the magic implicit in the title, so that its last paragraph feels overstuffed:

Second Daughter walks outside where everything smells like a ghost. She leaves without her red cloak, without her father's ax, without breadcrumbs for the path home. She has only her proud virginity that clangs like a bell....

Still, that last line deserves a second sounding, a third. The style enchants, even as the story disappoints. Hall may not resuscitate her fairy tales the way Robert Coover does, recycling his damsels and dwarves into startling freshness, but when she achieves a balance between archetypal and mundane, she delivers an ace:

They looked out the window at the quiet graveyard as they ate.... Beyond the graves, over the heap of the mountain, cows and horses grazed, and beyond that, teenage boys lay on their beds, drinking orange juice out of the...