cover image Margaret of the Imperfections: Stories

Margaret of the Imperfections: Stories

Lynda Sexson. Persea Books, $16.95 (211pp) ISBN 978-0-89255-131-6

The 10 stories in this first collection exhibit a wide range of voices while focusing sharply on that space in human lives where the sacred and the mundane intermingle. Sexson, who teaches religious studies at Montana State University, writes of disaffected individuals whose reality is more firmly grounded than that of the conventional people from whom they feel separate. The intriguingly titled ``Starlings, Mute Swans, an Impossible Angel, Evening Grosbeaks, an Ostrich, Some Ducks, and a Sparrow'' is told by a woman who believes her brother is about to marry the angel the two of them once saw as children; observations on love, jealousy and betrayal intersect in dazzling ways. In ``Foxglove'' a young woman cares for her husband's dying grandfather, a man who had been her savior when she was a child and who had raped her during her teens. ``Hope Chest'' is about a retarded woman of unspecified age who awaits the marriage her mother always spoke of as though it were something that would happen to her the way puberty did. The title story, about a woman whose body grows pearls, is a masterpiece of suggestion and subtlety. In Sexson's earthy, meticulous tales anything is possible and everything significant. (August)