"You are not here" says the sign in the corn maze. In Pink Motel knowledge comes enfolded in maps and diagrams old board games cracks in the ceiling everything we use to tell us where we are and how we got there. What if the interstate is a mobius strip and the restaurant offers us a casserole of hearts? How White asks can we account for the journey that brought us to this place? This haunting book takes us from the Badlands to the subways of New York and reminds us that the very gravity that holds us to the earth is suspect that only language saves us from the maps that flap away like owls the off-ramps that lead only to soybean fields the railway station where we wait for the last train that will ever come.
Patti White was raised in the military she has now lived in eleven states some of them twice. She studied intergroup relations at the University of Kentucky then moved to Colorado to do pre-sentence investigations for the Fourth Judicial District courts. She returned to school to study contemporary narrative and literary theory and now teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Alabama where she co-founded Slash Pine Press. Her work has appeared in a number of journals including Iowa Review River Styx North American Review Forklift Ohio New Madrid Slippery Elm and Gulf Coast. Patti is currently at work on a novella with eight narrators a tornado outbreak the somewhat undead and the mysterious disappearance of the State of Mississippi.
"You hold in your hands the map for a sumptuous wander. And you are promised the ocean. Promised crackers cracking almost like bones. Promised trickster maps and miasmic roads and dryads. Via relentless tinkering with the interiors of the mind. Via apocalyptic tectonics. Like Browning's Childe Roland Patti White's Lucy comes nose to nose with the central questions of any quest: is she fit to see fit to fail succeed move even? I am moved to observe that every hole opened along the way overwells and overbrims to flooding with White's clipped and kinetic music. You will be haunted - gaunt and lonesome. But just like the ocean wallows forever in every shell Patti White's etched exacting image-making will sound and spellbind you long after." - Abraham Smith
