Saba and Hagos, a young girl and her mute older brother have been displaced from Eritrea during the country’s long War of Independence.

The idea of acceptance, riddled with reluctant connotation, sometimes betrays itself.

Wexelblatt’s Hsi-wei Tales is a wonderful fusion of poetry and prose that captivates and holds nuggets of wisdom far beyond the fortune cookie kind.

However, this slim, powerful volume presents a world so viscerally haunting, readers are likely to pick up both. In each, Koesters balances the music (and often the humor) of her characters’ voices with unflinching portrayals of sexual abuse, religion, stratifications of class and race, and the cultural reverberations of cyclical, endemic violence.

Early in the novella, Rytkheu writes that a “legend could be said to be a truth that people had ceased to believe in.” The story is riddled with similarly potent lines, all of which can be independently pondered and applied to religious and philosophical conundrums that exist outside of Rytkheu’s story.

It’s the sort of literary paradox definitely worth exploring. And it may be the very essence of humanity that Wortman-Wunder has deftly described in this remarkable collection.

Crawford, like her characters, is not fearful, but bold and courageous in molding a novel that is unafraid to push the envelope of both our own expectations of genre and narrative, and how it should be deployed to expand a writer’s creative range. For readers, she tells a story that uncannily reflects the conditions of our collapsing world. Like her artist-detectives, we can investigate the terrible decay at the center of human experience, yet with hope and effort, we can also rebuild.

One might excuse oneself for reading it in a single sitting, as I did, finding it difficult to put down or forget. But it would be unforgivable, or at least odd, if one doesn’t find the volume a tour de force of classic and formidable craft as well as talent.

This is no novel. This is writing about writing itself that explores the intersections between the life, or lives, of the writer(s) and the written work(s). A ribald blast of immersion into the meta-poetic, if you will, which is only further compounded by the mystery of who is really behind this work.