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a wild cold state book coverPoetic Irony & Hateful Characters

Author: Debra Monroe

I’m not quite sure how Wild, Cold State found its way into my overflowing book collection, although the battered, plastic wrapped cover makes me suspect a library sale. When the going rate is as-much-as-you-can-carry for a dollar, I tend to buy on a whim: I liked the title. I liked the gorgeous car on the cover with its yesterday-I-was-cool, today-I-am-lost vibe. What I didn’t like so much is the actual stories that are equal parts depressed irony and lyrical gravity.

Wild, Cold State is a collection of eight semi-linked short stories, each focused on the failed love-life of an embittered woman living against the harsh backdrop and economic ruin of rural Wisconsin. We have a waitress secretly longing for a forbidden love who instead finds herself swallowed by the din of male pressure, from both the bad guys and the good guys. We have an abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend and an upper-class, A student girlfriend who finds herself attracted and repelled by a relationship that is slowly killing her. We have bars, drinking, drugs, and dissatisfying, snowed-in one night stands. We have farms, and hard roads, and wives sick of the life they have chosen. We have second chances that disintegrate, women who want men who won’t have them, and jokes that blanket a low-grade, throbbing pain that runs, feverish, through a circular life. The women weave around each other and sometimes their younger selves, appearing in the backgrounds of one another’s stories, but all speaking with one and the same voice: dissatisfaction. Unrequited desire for – something. Unmet expectations. The disappointment of ordinary, dissipated, day-to-day letdowns.

It’s beautifully written, if dense and meandering. The words themselves have more akin to the ambiguity and depth of poetry, as the stories all strive for feeling over action. And the feeling is intensely disheartening. Pointless even. The dingy, sticky bars and the frayed women, burned out and giving up before even leaving their 20s definitely creates a mood, but it’s not one readers would really seek. If Sylvia Plath talked about sex and bars, well, then Wild, Cold State would fit right in with her collections.

The real problem, though, is that the characters are hateful. The situations, for the most part, are of their own choosing; the problems and bad relationships are the direct results of pure selfishness couched behind naval gazing lyricism. None of the women care about the people they interact with along the way: the men (and that one woman) they sleep with, the lives that intersect their own, the friends they betray. The sadness is rife, but it’s one that is deserved. The characters – every last one of them – are horrible people. In a weird way, they even know it. Their self-destructive nature, their wanton, meaningless grasping, all points to the fact that ultimately, they are so jaded, so ruined, that they don’t even care about themselves.

The stories go nowhere. They are “feeling” pieces, packets of near poetry that sound beautiful but are ultimately devoid of passion. The characters are dead. They move in a dead world and interact with others, zombified like themselves, bemoaning their unlife and yet continually stepping back into the same trash clogged rivers of their lives. They deserve it, and in the end, we close the book, desperate to bleach our brains free of the detritus of wasted lives, and move onto something, anything, with actual meaning.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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