Matt Briggs reviews The Sky Is A Well

“The form of the short short, though, seems at odds with these stories. These are short stories but to call them shorts seems diminutive or self-evident. The short short is a clipped form — a typically lyric story that has been cut or modified or blown apart by the severe constraints of length. Anthologies of short shorts tend to be an assortment of oddities. Writers can perform tricks that wouldn’t be possible in short stories or sustainable for a novel. The stories in The Sky is a Well, however, are sober and deliberate and although each of them is complete, could easily become the beginning of a novel. I’ve heard a theory that one of the reasons that short stories books are not popular with general readers is that unlike a novel, a book of stories has a dozen beginnings: it is a lot of work to begin something. Because the setting of these stories are similar, the configuration of female narrator to troubled mother and absent father repeated, I didn’t really feel as though I was beginning stories over and over again but rather hearing different takes of the same central problem. And the stories themselves are models of concision. “ review on Suburgian here