In this dazzling collection of miniature tales and poetic prose, Forrest Roth presents six galleries of enigmatic humans drifting across great distances for our consideration, including a suburban neighbor cooking only beets to distract his dark impulses, a detached mother whose child vanishes in an art museum, a lonely Japanese man using his nose to sign letters to his married lover, and many more. Hovering over themes of nature, family, joy, desire and death, Skeletal Lights from Afar carries along the remnants of accidental lives, continuing their mysterious voyage towards a destination as yet unknown.
In Skeletal Lights from Afar, Forrest Roth's language forms murmurations, each pulsing with interiorities of struggling narrators whose experiences unfold into one another, reflecting infinite impossibilities of a life lived in service of and service to. Roth asks us to think about our relationship to art, duty, the environment, love, strangers, music, and the frailty of human certainty. There are rumbles of Marcus' The Age of Wire and String and Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground echoing with each strike of Roth's approach; it is as if the work exists in three spheres, the experience of the past, the relevance of the present, and the narrative methodology of a time not yet seen. Skeletal Lights from Afar is a bold artistic vision, one you may not be able to put down until you've read it to completion and begun again. - Duncan Barlow, author of A Dog Between Us and The City, Awake
Dear Reader, you will never have read anything quite like the luminous Skeletal Lights from Afar, I can promise you that. Within these pieces, you are on a journey through startlingly fresh and exciting territory, which leads you through the natural world, the intellectual world, the small town, and the small room. Within these pieces there is humor and artfulness, but more than that even there is an examination of what it means to feel alone and observational in an ever crowded world. A master of voice, Roth's words become a ghost voice implanted in your psyche which remains long after you reach the end, offering you birds and flesh and bone. Indeed, they offer you the cycle of life, children climbing into bed between their parents to reclaim that shining moment of safety that is so fleeting to the last breath that awaits us all. - Myfanwy Collins, author of I Am Holding Your Hand and Echolocation
Reading this new book by Forrest Roth, I kept thinking, "Here is an original voice." Not exactly microfictions or prose poems, they blur those distinctions with meditation and observation and intellect, yet retain movement enough to sustain the tension of story. Forrest Roth has produced an accessible, yet challenging collection that will find an audience. - Gary Fincke, author of The Corridors of Longing and The Sorrows
Each of these magnificently strange pieces is a world in itself. Together they create a shimmering matrix of expression, insistent as a dream that won't let go. - Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney and In the Year of Long Division
Forrest Roth holds a Creative Writing Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marshall University in West Virginia. He is the author of a novella, Line and Pause (BlazeVOX, 2007), a prose poem chapbook, The Sullen Pages (Little Red Leaves, 2013), and a novel, Gary Oldman Is A Building You Must Walk Through (What Books, 2017). His short fiction has appeared in NOON, Denver Quarterly, Juked, Columbia Journal, Trnsfr, and other journals.
