Zglevians on the Move by Roppotucha Greenberg

Description

Here’s what others are saying:

 

‘Roppotucha’s hybrid flash/micro collection is unlike anything you’ve ever read before, the quirky, imagery, a mixture of fantasy and reality, is simply dazzling.’

Steven Campbell,
Editor of Ellipsis Zine

 

‘Reading this collection left me feeling drunk, I found myself saying ‘yes!’ out loud at many quirky, image-laden lines….Sharp and inventive with plenty between the lines.’

Stephanie Hutton,
Author of Three Sisters of Stone

 

‘If there’s a book that has it all, it’s Zglevians on the Move by Roppotucha Greenberg. It has moves, moving, movement, migration, emigration, immigration, travels, time travels, all kinds of travels. There’s hauntings and vanishings and much imagination. Yes, the imagination is something else and somewhere else and some time else and above your dusty chandelier with your great great great and very great grandmother turned into thorny vines interlacing it, listening in to the comings and goings of the house, and below the unvisited basement where a friend you’ve been missing for years resides all along and growls like a unicorn and you think it’s the pipes in wintertime and beyond this earth and that earth and the stars and the moons and the moonmoons and all galaxies and this universe and another universe if there is such and maybe there’s an end to cosmoses, but there’s definitely no end to the ingenious imagination and vernacular in Zglevians on the Move. It’s a must read to reread and rave about at a rave with your ancestral ghosts and their goats and maybe gods different than yesterday’s gods and the moon because I love the moon so much, okay? I promise you, a pioneer’s promise, you will love Greenberg’s whimsical, visionary, and clever book.’

Nadia Gerassimenko,
Editor of Moonchild Magazine & Author of at the water’s edge

 

‘One day, a time-warp weapon destroyed Zglevia, and stretched the survivors out across time. The membranes of their memories still connected their ghostly past to a modern future. Yet, they found themselves spread out, wandering in search of a clear present across lives thinned and faded.

“Double-ear me wellsome: you matter, very much.” – from “Let Me Tell You”

In Zglevians on the Move, Roppotucha Greenberg guides us along on an exploration of identity, family, magic, and the stretchy, mosquito-bit mess of our own timelines. This collection combines short fiction pieces like “On the Proper Use of Mosquitoes” and “A Soviet God, Long Ago” with themed micro-fiction series, such as “Some Cities Only Pretend to be Above Ground” and “About Me.”

“I am sorry. I used the past to stuff the turkey. I mean that potato stuffing was in the brown bowl and I got mixed up. Now it’s all soaked in turkey juices and dead bird entrails. I don’t know if it’s safe … to eat or otherwise. I feel awful. Can we let it go?” – from “When Witches Give Relationship Advice”

Greenberg is a master of packing poignant truths into these fantastic short forms that read like splashes of fairy tale poetry. When reading Zglevians, one feels keenly that contradiction of life, where at any point we exist as bright, rich characters, yet smudge and blend ourselves and our truths when time moves us along. Sometimes, her revelations sneak up on us. At the end of “Hunters,” which describes a people’s ancient hunt for words, the narrator suddenly remarks, “And now, after many years, I find it hard to talk to my mom.”

Through a series of ruminations on relationships, place, and self, we learn to hear a voice, someone whose soul has traveled to the sun, across oceans and time, yet remains an emigrated child of Zglevia all the same. In the end, Greenberg reminds us to remember and stay hopeful for all the versions of ourselves that make up us.’

André N. Lepine,
Editor of Elephants Never