Dislocate by Simone Person
Dislocate by Simone Person
Prose Winner of the 2017 Honeysuckle Chapbook Contest, chosen by Bhanu Kapil
The stories in Dislocate are lamentations of the desperate and devoted, featuring ravenous fish lovers and dream-filled runaways marked by lightning. Equally surreal and mundane, the characters in these stories both devastate and are devastated in their claustrophobic yearnings for connection. Dislocate explores the things that force our bodies and selves out of space in time, navigating breakups, sleepovers, and the banality of a dinner party.
Simone Person’s prose is both haunting and hilarious, her characters ever grasping for something real, the love they seek as elusive as clouds of smoke. This book questions: what happens to us when we want to exist in the world, but can’t?
About the Book
Paperback chapbook, 90 pages
Release date: July 1st 2018
Cover Design: Peter Barnfather
Praise for Dislocate
"I chose Dislocate for its figural imaginary: the many creatures, beached or washed up, diverted during the course of a long journey; an extreme mermaid who talks back to her ambivalent rescuer, who feeds her (nevertheless) tin after tin of sardines; entities called Unperson or Bunnyman. Dislocate is a work of abject longing, set in temperatures that don't easily regulate or normalize. What is normal?, the book seems to ask, as each story builds a vortex of fear and love from which its characters don't easily, or always, escape."
— Bhanu Kapil, 2017 Honeysuckle Chapbook Contest Prose judge
"These playful, surreal stories are smart and gorgeous, and their pleasures conceal an inner darkness that’s hard to shake.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"The world is a very strange place. Simone Person sustains a masterly balance in Dislocate, this entrancing, myth-making, exceptional short story collection about life lived in between the natural and the supernatural."
— Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
"Simone Person’s fiction blows me away. Gorgeously wrought prose in stories so surprising I never know what’s going to happen in the next sentence—let alone the next page! Person seamlessly blends reality and fantasy into one whole, real, magical world. If you keep a mermaid in the bathtub, you might need to use the smoothie-maker to puree the fish heads she likes to eat. You can try to Say Anything your estranged girlfriend with a car-speaker serenade beneath her window, but it might make you disappear, body part by body part, while she’s inside watching Designing Women. The world works in bizarre and mystical ways, and Simone Person captures the weirdness and the miraculous all at once in its mundanity and its glory. "
— Thisbe Nissen, author of Our Lady of the Prairie
An Excerpt
About the Author
Simone Person grew up in small Michigan towns and Toledo, Ohio, and is a dual MFA/MA in Fiction and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. Her work has appeared in Queen Mob’s Teahouse and Amazon’s Day One, among others, and has been anthologized in Crab Fat Magazine: Best of Year Three. She sporadically uses Twitter and Instagram at @princxporkchop.
Read our interview with Simone here.