Cydney Chadwick. muscle and fat and...

Cydney Chadwick. muscle and fat and Bone. Penngrove, CA: Avec works 2001. 187 pp. $14

This is a collection of thirty-five real short stories that do not afford the author the space to organize and maintain complex characterizations. Chadwick writes the trice of crisis rather than the character in crisis. She not aways emotion as a wild, confused reflex--"a genetic impulse"--that leads to unpredictable and misguided answers Yet her prose remains composed and precise in its portrayal of aggression and violence.

In "The Gift Horse's Mouth" a woman receives a gift