The Denver Gazette

Loneliness a focus of 16 linked stories

BY KATHERINE A. POWERS Star Tribune

The 16 linked stories of Anthony Bukoski’s seventh collection find their heart in Superior, Wis., “a broken place of beat-up dreams, beat-up taverns, and empty lots the north wind blows through.”

His characters are, for the most part, working-class Polish-Americans, though two of the stories return to Poland of the past, impressions of which still haunt the following generations in America. In these stories, people appear and reappear, men and women who spend their days and nights working at the fiberboard or lime plant, the flour mill, oil refinery, or loading docks with occasional forays to Duluth, Minn., Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and Milwaukee.

Chief among the recurring characters is kindhearted Eddie Bronkowski, would-be professional heavyweight boxer, eventually brain- damaged, deserted by his wife, and working as a deckhand on the Henry L. Stimson, a Great Lakes freighter. Other players include Eddie’s father and brother, both changed for the worse by their military service, and his cousin Leon in Milwaukee, on the verge of losing his much-vaunted job as a “big city insurance agent.”

A sense of loneliness, failed prospects and obsolescence pervades the stories, from smashed-up Eddie — whom we follow from youth through his terrible decline — and seeping all the way back to Poland where, in 1939, Janusz Brozek, a shopkeeper, looks at images of himself created by mirrors, and wonders “how to become the man at the far end of the reflections, the man of energy and purpose he’d been when business was better.”

A brighter note is struck by Verna, once happily married to Lloyd, but who has left him after 14 years, oppressed by his rigidity and silence. Signing on as a cook, she finds friendship and appreciation from the crew, victims to greater or lesser extent of fate’s pitiless blows. As it happens, women fare better in these stories than men, foremost being “the Blondes of Wisconsin.”

BOOKS

en-us

2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-20T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.denvergazette.com/article/282449941982751

The Gazette, Colorado Springs