#keithleemorris

[morgangraves]

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[yaminideen]

Call it What You Want, Keith Lee Morris, Review

  Tim House Books

    This is a collection of stories about people who live on the fringes of their own self-esteem, or of their dreams .These are people trying to make sense of life’s unpredictability, the inability to control it. What shines in this story is empathy and understanding. When you are writing about a father who commits suicide (What I want from you), leaving behind a young son dying of cancer, a young woman and a younger still son meeting death again and again, you could get soppy and give me a handkerchief-soaked-with-greeting-card-words. But that’s what Keith Lee Morris doesn’t do. He engages you with the predicament of the individual; he walks into this perplexing tunnel of the human mind and gently moves his flashlight around.

In Camel Light, a middle aged man spots a cigarette lying under the dishwasher. The cigarette leads him to wonder about his kids, his marriage, his wife’s possible infidelity and then the disintegration of the world around him, a certain powerlessness as he zooms out into global warming, into an apocalypse gathering at his dinner table while he sits and holds a cigarette.

In Guests, young college graduates are employed at a fancy hotel. They get by with their fantasies for the rich, bored female guests, sometimes seducing them. David, one of the kids is the quiet one, the one who is willing to watch other people living their lives. An unbreathed sigh for what could have been in my case, if I had learned long ago to play by the rules that I never knew existed. What does he choose when a rich guest offers him an option that could change his life?

An adolescent boy emotionally frozen forever after a friend’s murder, of ordinary people coming to face with their very fragility. You cut through stereotype, condescension, the temptation for flowery prose, caricature, hyperbole and every folly that literature is capable of and just lying there casually is truth. Call It What You Want.

  First City Magazine, 2010