The Passion of Woo & Isolde
Jennifer Tseng. Rose Metal Press, $12 chapbook (52p) ISBN: 978-1-941628-09-6
I love when writers cross genres. Fiction, especially flash, becomes stronger when it borrows from poetry—the emotion in object, the power of what’s not said, and endings that change the beginning. Jennifer Tseng, Winner of the Eleventh Annual Rose Metal Short Short Chapbook Competition (judged by Amelia Gray), is an award winning poet and prose writer, and we can see how well the two genres speak to each other in The Passion of Woo & Isolde. The chapbook is full of small narratives, some that stand alone, some that build on each other, all with a keen attention to language, precision, and breadth. The book is broken up into three sections. The first—and in this reader’s opinion, the strongest—section is comprised of standalone shorts. Each has the feel of a modern day fable. A mouse has a covenant with a lion. A woman wakes to find she’s turned into an old man. Sheep live for ages surrounded by an electric fence, some occasionally testing their boundaries. But Tseng uses our prior knowledge of fables to trick us. There is rarely a moral to the story. Instead, there’s either a sharp turn or a dead end just as the conflict begins. Endings like “She had to strain her failing eyes to finally see it,” “She knew if she stood there a minute longer, her life would change completely,” and “The taste of grass, the secret red burn, were equal to knowing they could go beyond, survive, and return,” stick with us and leave us meditating in