Soul, Ghost, My Absolute
by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson's new collection has been described as "a dreamlike verbal vision that evokes alternative realities that enjoy their own visionary possibilities." Eleven fictions that call forth Vesuvius erupting, the mythical Lilith, Mussolini on his rise to power, the Angel of Nagasaki, dangerous invitations, old laments, anomalous perceptions, and alchemical nights.

For years I’ve been dreaming of a collection of stories by Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, a writer of immense daring, attentiveness, and grace. Soul, Ghost, My Absolute fulfills this dream. Like the magical Wak-Wak Tree described in its pages, it blossoms with strange enchantments: demon lovers, buried gardens, restless oceans, and above all, language—a ceaseless music that delights as it beckons us into mystery.

—Sofia Samatar, author of The White Mosque and The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

The in between, the transitory, what is absent, or lost―the focus of Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s stunning new short fiction collection. She asks: Is what we feel more real than reality itself? She answers through dreams, apparitions, love, memory, longing, and spirituality. Palermo Stevenson is a master of the unseen, the glimpsed and the overlooked, trees, a woman, a man, dogs, children, a bird. She is unafraid of dichotomies, distilling what is important in life by viewing what is beyond death to attain beauty.

—Laurie Blauner, author of Out of Which Came Nothing and The Solace of Monsters

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s writing is often dreamlike, verbal visions that evoke alternative realities that enjoy their own visionary possibilities. She accomplishes this sensation though her unique use of language, sentences whose rhythms are mesmerizing, the objects of their content not quite solidly there, as if being observed through a haze of consciousness…

…although some have called this book a collection of stories, it is more a gathering of prose and occasional prose poetry that does not fit into any rigid genre category. These are language pieces that access realms beyond that of most fiction. The “My Absolute” aspect of the title suggests the philosophical context of the “absolute” that refers to ultimate reality or truth that exists independently of human perception or understanding. Stevenson seeks language to convey such a reality.

—Walter Cummins, California Review of Books

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s recent release, Soul, Ghost, My Absolute, brings the reader into the authors streaming world of words rounding bends, straits, splashing outcrops in imagery, metaphor and poetics… There is a lot of ground covered in these short bursts. Beginning with the Wak-Wak Tree yielding human fruit in various stages of development to various characters in the other pieces, such as the pale teenager who appears and disappears, fire, haunted houses, odd turtles, train stations, rotting structures, Ibis, landfills and scrapheaps… Palermo Stevenson is a master of imagery laced with metaphor bound in a surrealist casing.

—g emil reutter, North of Oxford

Read an excerpt from Soul, Ghost, My Absolute