Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader
The Geography of First Kisses, winner of Kallisto Gaia Press’s Acacia Prize, is a collection of fourteen short stories by Karin Cecile Davidson, author of the novel Sybelia Drive. The stories vary in that they are told from different perspectives, span the mid-fifties to today, and are set in locales ranging from Gulf Coast states to Midwest prairies, with a couple of stops outside U.S. borders. The constants are the lyrical and layered prose, and the focus on girls and young women. Whether these characters come down Lucinda Williams’s gravel road of the epigraph or visit the outskirts of Tallahassee, they are attuned to and act in response to the inherent dangers and beauties of their environments, whether to their benefit or detriment.
The title story is narrated by a “not too shy, but not quite pretty enough” girl. She’s also not quite sixteen and determined not to fulfill the aphorism about sweetness. On a Maine beach she sets into motion a change, her entry into an alluring and risky sexual world told through four compass points: “On the lake directions were like sins, cardinal and complicated.” Back home in New Orleans, one of the four corresponding relationships produces a startling complication she can no longer hide. “The Biker and the Girl,” set in a different New Orleans neighborhood, also increases the threat of danger in a matter of a few pages, culminating in a shocking action perhaps not unwelcome to the girl.
In the haunting “We Are Here Because of a Horse,” domestic abuse is told at a remove, narrated by a loving young husband in Oklahoma, the details of his wife’s past unknown to him. After she literally falls into his life, he facilitates her search for the horse that helped her flee a home full of male relatives. As with the others, this story expands beyond the page, leading to reflections on the repercussions the husband is not equipped to handle and on the cycle his wife is moored in, one the couple may be doomed to reenact.
“Gorilla” is another haunting story of damage. In a Berlin zoo with her children, the narrator connects with an encaged animal, as the reader learns of her bond with her husband’s sister. A healing is hard to imagine for the sisters-in-law, only more hurt in store for the next generation. The opposite is true for the characters in the humorous “Sweet Iowa,” told from the viewpoint of a sleepy pig farmer with no experience of romance, until he recognizes the new woman in town as his dream-girl. With the fate of a named runt symbolizing the couple’s future, the protagonist wakes up to reality: “… he fell asleep on the couch and dreamt a dream more real than his waking life, a dream that cut into him, a dream so unadorned, so bare and bewildering, that he couldn’t wait to wake up and keep on living.”
A few stories employ light serviceable touches of magical realism, most notably in “In the Great Wide,” a touching story told by a teenaged mother. The devoted grandmother doesn’t seem to notice, but strange disappearances in their Catholic city are encroaching upon the family of three. A flash piece, “The Last Time I Saw Mitsou,” also uses surreal imagery to great effect, as books appear out of nowhere, illuminating a newly married woman’s loss and grief.
The Geography of First Kisses is an exquisitely rendered collection. The stories are organized as if a thematic baton has been passed down the pages, allowing each story to comment upon another through lovely and sometimes brutal metaphors, such as the killing and dressing of birds in the final story, “Bobwhite.” Staying with rural-Mississippi relatives due to her mother’s hospitalization, the bewildered young protagonist spends her days measuring life and death with a ruler. Using less benign tools, other characters try to take the measure of Davidson’s girls and women; but all the while they’re mapping out the miles, even the inches, of their own lives, yearning for something else, actively readying themselves for something different.
The Geography of First Kisses by Karin Cecile Davidson
Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023, $21.95 paper
ISBN 13: 9781952224256
Teresa Tumminello Brader, mother of two grown children and stepmother of four, was born in New Orleans and lives in the area still. Her first book, a work of hybrid memoir/fiction, Letting in Air and Light, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press. Her short stories, poetry, reviews, and essays appear in print anthologies and online at Halfway Down the Stairs, Deep South, MER, Lit Pub, Months to Years, and others.