Order THE INCOMING TIDE here
(also reviewed)
Order OUR LOVE WILL GO THE WAY OF THE SALMON here
Order BOTTOM FEEDERS here
I've had a rough 2015 so far, but one thing that's been consistently great is the reading. It's been a surprising, elating and transcendent reading year and Cameron Piece is one of my favorite new discoveries, both as an author and as an editor with Lazy Fascist Press (more on that next Monday). He writes a fiction lean and pure with a troubling sense of intimacy. I finished Cameron Pierce's first short story collection a head full of dreams and an immaterial feeling of disappointment that he wasn't my friend in real life. Creepy, I know. Pierce's fiction has this bizarre effect on me (and a couple other people I won't name here).
I've picked up THE INCOMING TIDE almost as soon as it landed in my mailbox and read it over the weekend and it confirmed what I've been thinking all along: Cameron Pierce is a goddamned mystic and he shares the Greater Truths of the Universe with us in his fiction. We're not worthy.
THE INCOMING TIDE is a microfiction/poetry collection, which is a format that puzzles just about everybody not familiar with the author. How does it work? Is it possible to sell a satisfying collection of microfiction and poetry? Of course it is. The concept probably needed beacons of literary vision like Cameron Pierce and Broken River Books (who publised Pierce's latest two collection) to make it work, but it did and THE INCOMING TIDE is brilliant for reasons you can't possibly expect. While I think I benefited from reading OUR LOVE WILL GO THE WAY OF THE SALMON before THE INCOMING TIDE, I thought it manages to pushed Cameron Pierce's vision of fishing tales a step further.
I've read THE INCOMING TIDE like the journals of Cameron Pierce. The stories range from Pierce's trademark immediacy and intimacy to the all-out fishing tales, but it was all non-fiction to me during my reading. It gave a magical edge to the collection. The stories and the poems are so short, they feel like memories scrawled into a notebook day after day. Some felt less realistic than others, but Pierce always keeps the same narrator and the stories are all written in the first person. The different range of the micro stories just felt like parts of a greater fisherman mythology that Cameron Pierce started creating with OUR LOVE WILL GO THE WAY OF THE SALMON. THE INCOMING TIDE feels like peeking behind the curtain of his prior collection.
Cameron Pierce is a pure storyteller in the oral tradition. He's a voice around the bonfire, that guy coming to work every Monday with wild stories about his weekend. There was a storyteller like him in your life at some point, so his voice will sound familiar and immediate to you. A very simple story of how he stumbled upon a water snake when fishing brought a huge grin to my lips because of the voice it was told in. For a moment, I was transported at the bar, I heard the clinging of bottles and the diffuse laughter of friends listening to that crazy story. Therein lies the power of THE INCOMING TIDE, it is so immediate and alive that it feels halfway between reality and fishing folklore.
I had a lot more to say than I thought I would about a 73 pages book. Don't let the size of THE INCOMING TIDE fool you into thinking it's only an afterthought to OUR LOVE WILL GO THE WAY OF THE SALMON. Cameron Pierce's nimble writing will pry complex and long-buried emotions out of you out of sheer simplicity and immediacy. I am now convinced that Pierce is a literary mystic: it was written somewhere that I would read his work and become a rabid advocate. Pierce knew that. Isaac Kirkman problably knew that. A bunch of ageless dudes with gray beards and hooded robes knew that too and now you know. Next time you're out book shopping and see a Cameron Pierce book on the aisle, don't let doubt and hesitation get in the way of the Universe. You can thank me after, as usual.
Cameron Pierce is a pure storyteller in the oral tradition. He's a voice around the bonfire, that guy coming to work every Monday with wild stories about his weekend. There was a storyteller like him in your life at some point, so his voice will sound familiar and immediate to you. A very simple story of how he stumbled upon a water snake when fishing brought a huge grin to my lips because of the voice it was told in. For a moment, I was transported at the bar, I heard the clinging of bottles and the diffuse laughter of friends listening to that crazy story. Therein lies the power of THE INCOMING TIDE, it is so immediate and alive that it feels halfway between reality and fishing folklore.
I had a lot more to say than I thought I would about a 73 pages book. Don't let the size of THE INCOMING TIDE fool you into thinking it's only an afterthought to OUR LOVE WILL GO THE WAY OF THE SALMON. Cameron Pierce's nimble writing will pry complex and long-buried emotions out of you out of sheer simplicity and immediacy. I am now convinced that Pierce is a literary mystic: it was written somewhere that I would read his work and become a rabid advocate. Pierce knew that. Isaac Kirkman problably knew that. A bunch of ageless dudes with gray beards and hooded robes knew that too and now you know. Next time you're out book shopping and see a Cameron Pierce book on the aisle, don't let doubt and hesitation get in the way of the Universe. You can thank me after, as usual.
