The rest of Pushcart gets better

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, short stories, poems, collections

I wrote in the prior post about the volume 2025 Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, that a large proportion of the stories in the first third of the volume are for very niche audiences. Happily, audience awareness broadened after that. I rejected only four of the pieces making up pages 175-442. I am a bit surprised that I marked a "+" on ten prose pieces and four poems! Let's be clear, the only thing "poetic" about the poems is the evocative atmosphere. They were on subjects that mean something to me. I'll mention one:

"Memory" by Kevin Prufer summoned memories of my own mother as she descended into the fog of Alzheimer's Dementia, and also very early memories of leading by grandfather by the hand on walks, to make sure he found his way back home. The last line is about another poem for the author's mother that he didn't complete, "…because it was too sad and none of it / was helpful to anyone." Well, Kevin, the piece you did write was helpful to me.

When you know your offering is in a niche, there are ways to expand its reach. I'll mention two examples:

"The Crows of Karachi" by Rafia Zakaria presents a slice of life in the poor district of Karachi, Pakistan (truthfully, most of the city so qualifies). The crows are emblems of the vagaries of life, and the climax of the piece contrasts two women, one (the author's mother) who fed small birds while being vigilant to keep the crows from driving them away, and the other woman feeding birds indiscriminately, which fed only the crows.

"Blackbirds" by Lindsey Drager, the last piece in the volume, is a sad tale of post-partum depression, a rather extreme case thereof, seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old daughter.

Verdict: I found the volume worth reading, even if I had to "engineer" my reading pace to minimize the junk.

By the way, the last 98 pages of the 540-page volume comprise various lists and indexes, but the "Contributors' Notes" take up just 3½ pages, barely a line or two per author. Not really enough in my view.