Broken Fiction

Marlene Kadar

• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781771339452
• eBook ISBN: 9781771339469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Broken Fiction is a collection of short autofictional stories and poems that both offer solace and depict anguish at the collision of memory, loss, and grief. This kind of story-making negotiates a recognition and acceptance of hard truths without resorting to easy resolution.

The pieces in this volume are playful and fierce. The narrator's willingness to give attention to where love works or goes wrong, or to the moments when suffering cannot be veiled by a positive attitude—even as the comic or absurd overwhelms the tragic and humiliating—takes us to places that inhabit both memory and fiction. Photographs break the fiction and pull the reader into the inevitable forces of time and loss and death.

Broken Fiction invites readers to consider a way through—and sometimes around—illness and love, pain and joy, and gives a droplet of hope in nature's comedy of errors and coincidence.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Broken Fiction
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Between the Worlds of the Well and the Unwell
• The Trip
• Ode to a Node
• Salvage
• The Truth
• Petechia
• A Work of Art
• Positively Gin
• Changing the Subject
• Soft Figs
• Her Tears
• Approaching and Forgetting
• To Have a Daughter
• She Made Me Read Sharon Olds and Look What Happened
• The New Pearl Necklace
• Alone
• Regret Powers Love, or, Joseph and Irma
• Imitation
• Stairs
• Three Corners
• Quietness Is a Poem
• Ida and Liz
• My Mother Died?
• Green Gold, Hard Work
• My Grandmother Only
• Fruit Tree They Might Have Planted Before They Were Naturalized
• Defend Me, or, Regret
• Saving Seats
• Big Laughing Guy Turns Thirty-One
• The New Baby and Emma Goldman
• Remembering, or, Love
• Another Letter to My Mother
• Highway 400 Tells Stories about Teens
• Too Much Beauty
• The Time Will Come: Part One
• Christmas Morning 2012
• Prodigious Peace in Human Metre
• Injured Sparrow
• The Time Will Come: Part Two
• I Heard the Lion Roar
• Broken Fiction: Part One
• Dreams
• Spring Bus Stop
• Of a Piece – The Conductor
• Of a Piece, Still The Tall Man
• When We Are Thirty-Two
• For Her Twenty-Sixth Birthday
• He Has a Birthday That We All Play
• The Voice in the Angle
• Skin Plus Two Makes
• For Dori
• Remembering, or, Disdain
• The Rabbit Hole
• To Perform
• You Have Read This Far from 1320
• Tears Are Hungarian?
• One: Turning and Pulling
• Two: And Then There Is Love
• Cottage Story, Autumn
• The Call about My Death
• Purple Moth
• So, What Is the Purpose of Our Lives, She Asked
• It Didn’t Start with Me?
• Cultivating Gullibility
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author