In the defiantly mundane heartland suburbs of Chris Haven's debut collection, a real estate agent compels a stranger with late-stage dementia to accompany him to sell houses; a gruesome power tool injury somehow heals the tense relationship between two neighbors; and a Baptist minister recalls his own baptism, which is mysteriously tied to his first experience of the female anatomy. With devastating stoicism and surprising tenderness, Haven's portraits of twenty-first-century Americana revisit the rituals and archetypes of a vividly familiar world-and the strange, surreal magic that inhabits its everyday rhythms.
