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Commentary
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“The Current That Carries is profoundly in touch with the ways the world can reveal transcendent grace through the simplest things, the humblest things, even in the quotidian clutter of modern life and culture. These are ravishingly beautiful stories. Lisa Graley is truly an important new writer. Flannery O’Connor would have loved her sensibility, would have loved this book.” - Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“In this powerful and engaging debut collection, The Current That Carries, Lisa Graley writes knowingly and powerfully about the nature of family in the rural world of small towns as people struggle to take hard care of each other . . . and their animals. The stubborn hope living here is strongly reminiscent of the stories of Annie Proulx: all these lives at—or near—the end of the road reluctantly offering up their secrets.” - Ron Carlson, author of Return to Oakpine and A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories “From a grandmother who writes a letter to Ron Howard imploring him to direct a movie about a community tragedy, to a son who discovers a tractor mysteriously buried in his recently deceased father’s grave, to a beloved goat that appears as a ghost to a man living out his last days, you will be surprised and enthralled by the terrain covered in The Current That Carries. Lisa Graley writes with compassion, empathy, and a deep understanding of characters struggling with identities and responsibilities, or simply with staying alive. These powerful and honest stories not only examine the fragility of the human body but, more importantly, the resilience of the human heart.” - Karin Lin-Greenberg, author of Faulty Predictions |
Review
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Kirkus Reviews. Issue Date: July 15, 2016
, Online Publish Date: July 2, 2016
"Eight stories that give voice to incommunicable aspects of love and loss. Graley (Box of Blue Horses, 2013) sets these eight stories in Appalachia. Her characters are closely connected with the natural world; they chop wood, plow fields, and raise goats. Indeed, nature—its constant demands, its force, and its beauty—catalyzes much of the action in this collection. In the title story, a boy nearly drowns in a river. Though he survives, the incident quietly shifts the course of his life. In "Burying Ground," characters gather to bury an old friend and discover that something is already buried in his plot. As Graley traces the history of relationships between neighbors, spouses, and families across generations, she reveals their attempts to not only commune with nature, but through it. At times, the metaphors can become a bit heavy. In "Heartwood," a father with a failing heart describes the resilient but dead bark at the center of a tree to the adult child he does not fully understand. Most often, however, the parallels resonate profoundly. One particularly memorable piece opens with the sudden, violent illness of two dogs. A neighbor contemplates what, if anything, he can do to help the owner through it. "There are some sorrows you can't enter... So I tell myself," he says, articulating a unifying theme of the book. A subtle, powerful portrait of the strength and limits of human connectedness." |