“If there’s a more perfect title for Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection, Death, Desire and Other Destinations, I would be shocked,” writes reviewer Cole Meyer of this spectacular new flash collection, out September 15th from Okay Donkey Press. Read the full review below, and don’t miss out on this great debut!
If there’s a more perfect title for Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection, Death, Desire and Other Destinations, I would be shocked. Death abounds in this collection of fifty flash stories, only equaled or outmatched by the undercurrent of female desire that is laced through nearly every story.
In “Alligators,” the collection’s opening story, and one of the longest, the narrator, bearing her mother’s effects (“Before her demise, I didn’t know how much space a life requires,”) meets a gypsy girl on a bus. Here, we are first treated to Zambrano’s writing of physical desire, both sexual and sensual, that will follow throughout the collection: “She unbuttons my jeans, pushes her fingers down, the cold surface of her rings maneuver inside my body, one by one… we are a tangle of tongues.”
