So insanely Cross-Smith we are. And so podcast. Smitten too, yo. Not to mention the Every Kiss A War, Whiskey Paper, Louisville, marriage, Roxane Gay, and kissing. Always. Can't get away from that. So do hit it, now, yes, nice. It just might change your life.
There is travel and read, planes and trains, hotels, and couches and coffee and run. There is also place, Philadelphia and Hartford, and New Orleans, both in person, just months ago, and now in the work of Kristin Fouquet, in this case The Olive Stain and Rampart & Toulouse, collections of stories about place, and people, and New Orleans, always, and abundantly, in all its sweaty, fetid, alcohol drenched glory. There are collections and writers we love. Writers of place and time, Raymond Carver, Junot Diaz, Drown certainly, Elizabeth Crane with The Messenger is Hot, Faulkner and the stories of Yoknapatawpha, and the wonderful and recently consumed Every Kiss A War by Leesa Cross-Smith. These are works that hang together, and that is what Fouquet does, and is, the voice of the jazz singer, the lost priest, moist apartments, Absinthe, rotting mansions, languid lovers, madness, and heat. It is the idea we have about New Orleans when we think about it, and the experience we have of it when when we go there and try to take it all in. Still, we can never hope to capture any of this quite like Fouquet does. She doesn't merely live it and breathe it. For her New Orleans is Oxygen and DNA, and she captures its rhythms and colors in the way only someone who lives there can do. Like a portrait, or a shadow, live, indelibly burned onto the page, and sure to change lives.
As always there is travel and read, but sometimes there is crushing as well, and to loosely paraphrase ourselves - and how obnoxious is that - just about the sexiest thing we've ever read. Though to be clear, Every Kiss A War, the debut story collection from the Leesa Cross-Smith, is more than that: parenting, dating, stalking, broken relationships and broken people, not to mention, longing and fantasy, sadness and loss, and so much kissing and touching, and wanting to kiss and touch, all of which is ultimately a fantastically rich exploration of just how desperate our need can be to connect with someone, anyone, in any fashion we can. And yet, and yes, we suppose there is always an "and yet," it is really fucking sexy, terribly, and endlessly, and you can read Every Kiss A War for any number of reasons, the language and joy seeping off of the pages, or merely for the quite triumphant Whiskey & Ribbons, which will knock you on your ass, but the sexiness is reason enough, and for that you need look no further then the trifecta of interlocking stories - What The Fireworks Are For, Hold on, Hold on, and Cheap Beer & Sparklers - because they are sure to change your life.
