Meg Pokrass’ third book for Bamboo Dart Press is out today and available at better independent bookstores, lesser big boxes and direct from us. Her unique voice and groundbreaking work in helping to define Flash Fiction has been seen and published in New England Review, Five Points, McSweeney’s, Passages North among others and have been included in more than 800 literary journals and anthologies. Her new book, Old Girls and Palm Trees is a reflection on friendship, on memory and memories before us with lovely illustrations by Cooper Renner.
A wild and charming romp into old age that also examines who or what we belong to. Whether a friend who had become ‘a shadow that needed to be sewn back on,’ or the yearning for sunnier climes where childhood friends on their bikes ‘wobbled like palm trees,’ these small marvels are tender, surreal and astonish with their verve and capacity for surprise.
—Frankie McMillan, author of Eddie Sparkle’s Bridal Taxi
Old Girls and Palm Trees by acclaimed flash fiction writer Meg Pokrass is so full of wit, whimsy, and wonder, so full of startlingly fresh images and tender emotion, so full of life, love and loss I found myself reading the book through in one sitting and then reading it again. This amazing hybrid collection of linked mini stories and prose poems—reminiscent of the great Israel Writer Yoel Hoffman’s The Shunra and the Schmetterling—tells the story of the friendship of two old girls reunited in imagination after many years, who kiss the rims of their wine glasses, who glow in the dark, who ride their bicycles all over creation, who propose to their cat and hold each other up while skating on ice. Pokrass reinvents old age as a joyous, lovely ride under the palm trees. Old Girls and Palm Trees shimmers with wisdom and aged beauty.
—Jeff Friedman, author of Broken Signals
