The narratives in Shattered Fossils pay rapt attention to what mind and matter can do, their chain reactions across time and space. Each carefully crafted story investigates reality, without ignoring sources of political friction or questions of gender politics, with language that deploys generous helpings of musical effects.

Lax’s stories further the journey of questioning pre-pandemic “normalcy.” They may also suggest means to creating a future world that resists or dispenses with that so-called normalcy and its attendant oppressive ideologies, including colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity and the binaries of sex and gender, and anthropocentrism.

“When the world’s pouring in,” a character asks in Sharon Lax’s Shattered Fossils, “what would you do?” It’s a question that echoes through these intense stories – stories haunted by the past, haunted too by the pain of other living creatures. The troubled relationships at the heart of Lax’s work compel a glittering awareness of how we strive to make something beautiful from the strangeness of our lives.

These are captivating, erudite stories written in beautifully textured imagistic prose. The characters are complex and well-delineated; the settings are unforgettable and inseparable from the characters’ drama.

In Shattered Fossils, Sharon Lax has created a complex bricolage of music, visual art, poetry, and scientific knowledge to show readers that, even in our moments of grief, insecurity, secrecy, and pain, we are always connected to beauty, and to one another, through complex webs of cultural meaning. Her stories, erudite and ecstatic and sometimes ekphrastic, carry readers across dreamscapes to sites of mourning, scenes of crime, and wellsprings of shifting memories; each should be savored for the intellectual flourishes and bursts of poetry from an author whose creative powers are on full display.