Postcards from the Lilac City knows more than a thing or ten about hometowns and the tithing memory exacts. Mary Ellen Talley, its scribe, knows how memory takes form-repetitively, insistently, in uncontestable numbers, unshakable voices and resonant sensations-and she knows how to give dim shades indelible shape and also when to bide her time, letting the ghosts of the past do their work. She knows the iceberg theory of place, how much of lives spent in quiet places is underground, whispered, half-heard, half-hidden. But, when life does erupt in the Lilac City, it's anything but sedate. It's a spiffed-up antique carousel connecting the living and the dead: "The cemeteries are full / of riders."; it's a lust-ridden stone man sharing a lilac float with the annual crop of Lilac Queen contenders; it's the sputtering butterfly wheel of the narrator's first car; it's a plucky traveler who measures the exotic against home in a series of wry postcards: "This place is 400 years old. I was given a white silk scarf / of respect and I even tried yak butter. I am still so Spokane." This is a fine debut, and the Lilac City couldn't ask for a better bard.


-Deborah Woodard, author of Borrowed Tales