Reading Planked by the Abyss is not only like reading something completely different, but like reading for the first time. Each of Tuite’s sentences feel like a poem. Put together into a story, they feel like an experience. Put together all the stories and it’s like I have a new perspective I could never have foreseen, a new understanding of what fiction can do. — Michael Czyzniejewski, author of The Amnesiac in the Maze: Stories
Stories have always been medicine. And what is medicine but a movement toward the center? Written in a precise voice with exacting language, Planked by the Abyss is a descent and a reckoning. Sometimes a yawp, sometimes a punch, but always a movement toward the things that must be said and can only be said by this writer. Simply stunning.
Meg Tuite’s towering imagery is premium poetic; it sparks and catapults the thought of each sentence beyond the center then pulls everything right back to the core. Pay close attention! Intentional outlying signals stitch their properties onto each narrative’s promise. Lines like “She leaned into the hours of a clock,” “Don’t get all drizzly on me now. I got lightning beating thunder under this skin,” and, “Damn if she isn’t vertical as a dead marriage,” remind me of how good it is to have surrealist escape hatches tucked away in a hurtling life. Planked By the Abyss is a taut and sharply-awakening collection that goes to the top of my go-to reading pile when I need a shot of creative caffeine. I’m a huge fan of Meg Tuite’s writing, and you should be too.
Meg Tuite's new collections brims with voluptuous sentences and deep emotion. Whether they are flash fictions or narrative poems, about Robert Crumb's brother or an unnamed dying woman in hospice, they are all love and pain, humor and profound sadness. Tuite’s work is alive with wonder, always asking, how is that we make it through this life? She has no answer but shows us the way nonetheless. Tuite is the master of this short hybrid form, shying away from nothing, opening up the reader's heart with her stunning words.
In Meg Tuite’s exquisite and clever collection, Planked by the Abyss, each compressed and swelling line scars the tragic with hope and burns triumphantly. Page by page dense and willowy prose grabs the reader by the throat while ticking humor slices with titles like, “Runaway pronoun for grief,” “It’s never lonely in a leotard,” and “Every kid knows the price.” Storm full legged with Tuite through these domestic spaces of marriages, moves, deaths, drinks, drives, and oh, the bodies of broken and brave children. You’ll find the rough rub and rush of tattered life all here in lines pulled mesmerizingly taut and slack as marionettes.
Meg Tuite’s Planked by the Abyss is a soiled jubilation of hacked adenoids, pithy dimples, road trips, a prescient elephant, and a horny chihuahua. With fearless juxtapositions and raging rhyme, Tuite guides us through a world that conjures destruction while demanding awe. It is a place of artistic salvation and wonder, even as death looms, reminding us how marvelous and doomed we are.
No one writes sentences like Meg Tuite, who has a voice so unique it's a literary fingerprint. These stories are alive and unpredictable, beautiful and dangerous like a forest of angels' trumpets. With unmistakable style, Tuite captives in sentences so oddly poetic, so deeply surreal, they are sentient beings blooming with bizarro brilliance and the bewitchingly, timely wisdom of uncanny reality.
We might have to make up a new category of flash fiction for what Meg Tuite does. Reading Planked by the Abyss is not only like reading something completely different, but like reading for the first time. Each of Tuite's sentences feel like a poem. Put together into a story, they feel like an experience. Put together all the stories and it's like I have a new perspective I could never have foreseen, a new understanding of what fiction can do.
