The Descent of Music

Deborah Cumming. Plum Branch Press, $13 (150pp) ISBN 978-0-9702720-1-0

The fine-spun, meditative stories in Deborah Cumming's debut collection, The Descent of Music, capture a generation of women who forged careers and raised children in the '60s and '70s, and are left to wonder what now? At a 25th Peace Corps reunion, a woman and her former lover muse about what has become of their activist spirit and reminisce about his motorcycle, which rivaled her for his affections. An elderly woman who has recently installed her husband in a nursing home revels in the eerie pleasures of solitude. A cosmopolitan New Yorker and former civil rights lawyer ponders her strained relationship with her ""churchy"" grown daughter living in Milwaukee. Some of the subject matter is familiar, but Cumming, a former teacher and Thai translator, keeps sentimentality at bay with carefully wrought prose and stark honesty.

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