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Shorter Prose
From the introduction: "M Sarki, the poet, has expanded to prose and produced Shorter Prose, a collection of three stories, short, shorter, and very short, but being the work of a poet, each story continues to expand."
Shorter Prose is classified under fiction-memoir and includes three short stories: I. Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion II. A Different World from Olive Listed’s III. Max Lane. The book is a pocket-size 5 x 8 inches and is available in both hardcover and softcover versions as well as Kindle.
Shorter Prose is classified under fiction-memoir and includes three short stories: I. Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion II. A Different World from Olive Listed’s III. Max Lane. The book is a pocket-size 5 x 8 inches and is available in both hardcover and softcover versions as well as Kindle.
- GenresShort Stories
82 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2013
35 people want to read
About the author
M. Sarki
20 books240 followersFor the last several years M Sarki has maintained a literary blog called The Rogue Literary Society. Sarki can now be found more liberally on Substack https://substack.com/@msarki where he publishes his critical views on subjects and books read, photographs and nude art collaborations with his wife, as well as periodical attempts at creating poetic artifacts. Since 2000 Sarki has produced four collections of poetry and four books of prose.
M Sarki has also written, directed, and produced four short art films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola, The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, and he is the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.
--
m sarki
mewlhouse@gmail.com
M Sarki has also written, directed, and produced four short art films titled Gnoman's Bois de Rose, Biscuits and Striola, The Tools of Migrant Hunters, My Father's Kitchen, and he is the author of the feature film screenplay, Alphonso Bow.
--
m sarki
mewlhouse@gmail.com
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January 25, 2015
My elderly neighbour has been out since early morning raking leaves. He started with the small scattering underneath his one single tree, then he moved on to tackle all the visiting ones from other people’s gardens that had gathered on the footpath outside his house and even on his own front steps.
I imagine him waking up, preoccupied already by those ever swirling leaves, wanting to get outside quickly to tackle them, to force them into neat piles, to feel the satisfaction from the tidiness of his work, to put order on his little universe. It’s all about control.
Some people rake up leaves, others prefer to rake up words, and not always into such regimented piles, fortunately.
I imagine M. Sarki waking up in the early morning, already preoccupied with the words swirling around in his consciousness, both his own words and those that may have drifted in and settled in the corners.
But I don’t see him raking them into neat piles. No, I see him reaching down and raising bunches of them on high. I see him scattering them about with childlike glee, fascinated by their colour and shape, hypnotised by the new and creative patterns they make when they fall. That’s how M. Sarki fashions his universe - it’s all about poetry, it's all about the glory of words.
And talking of words, these three prose pieces are quick to read, as quick as kicking your way through your neighbour's carefully stacked piles of leaves, and just as satisfying. Go have some Autumn fun with them yourself!
April 29, 2013
M. Sarki is a GR friend, with whom I share a love of Walser and Sebald, among others. He's also a talented poet and writer, who sent me a copy of his latest work in return for an honest review. It's a pleasure to report that I am certain I would be captivated by Shorter Prose even if I didn't know Sarki at all.
There's something special about poets' approach to writing prose, and Sarki's Shorter Prose is no exception. I especially found that attention to sounds and rhythms, a delight in words, in the first and longest piece in this collection, "Ponzil, the Pistelero, and His Comedy of Combustion." In this prose piece, the narrator describes his childhood and adolescences in East Tawas, MI, a small town in which the Lutheran church cast a long shadow on his life, where he would be haunted by his being called "stupid" by the produce man at the A&P, where he came up against his father's disappointment in his not being a good Lutheran, not being smart, not fitting in better. The structure of this piece is beautifully crafted, with repetition of certain themes and people and stories from the narrator's past, all swirling together and carrying the reader on a sea of words and a perspective that could not be confined by the expectations of his neighbors in East Tawas. Faded family photographs, scans of childhood drawings, and ads from newspapers provide a visual accompaniment, but I was carried away by Sarki's writing -- insisting that white tissue paper is filmsy, not flimsy; reminding us of the magic of a plastic brontosaurus; considering the appropriateness of using the word avoirdupois. Later in this opening piece, he says, "In my case words become my playthings," for which I as his reader am thankful.
Highly recommended for lovers of language, appreciators of genre-breaking approaches to memoir and fiction and prose and poetry, and adventuresome readers willing to experience the frustration and limits of living in a small town, and the resilience of an imagination that refuses to see the world as everyone else does.
There's something special about poets' approach to writing prose, and Sarki's Shorter Prose is no exception. I especially found that attention to sounds and rhythms, a delight in words, in the first and longest piece in this collection, "Ponzil, the Pistelero, and His Comedy of Combustion." In this prose piece, the narrator describes his childhood and adolescences in East Tawas, MI, a small town in which the Lutheran church cast a long shadow on his life, where he would be haunted by his being called "stupid" by the produce man at the A&P, where he came up against his father's disappointment in his not being a good Lutheran, not being smart, not fitting in better. The structure of this piece is beautifully crafted, with repetition of certain themes and people and stories from the narrator's past, all swirling together and carrying the reader on a sea of words and a perspective that could not be confined by the expectations of his neighbors in East Tawas. Faded family photographs, scans of childhood drawings, and ads from newspapers provide a visual accompaniment, but I was carried away by Sarki's writing -- insisting that white tissue paper is filmsy, not flimsy; reminding us of the magic of a plastic brontosaurus; considering the appropriateness of using the word avoirdupois. Later in this opening piece, he says, "In my case words become my playthings," for which I as his reader am thankful.
Highly recommended for lovers of language, appreciators of genre-breaking approaches to memoir and fiction and prose and poetry, and adventuresome readers willing to experience the frustration and limits of living in a small town, and the resilience of an imagination that refuses to see the world as everyone else does.
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May 20, 2017M. Sarki’s short book, Shorter Prose, describes itself as “Fiction -- Memoir” which is a fine, non-oxymoron. A memoir, sensu stricto, is something written by or on behalf of someone who has accomplished something other than writing. But Sarki, aside from reading and reviewing on goodreads, writing the occasional book of poetry, is not the world-historical type figure who might earn a memoir. Good. But instead, he writes; fiction. “Fiction -- Memoir” is no new genre if we might recollect that all writing is autobiographical in a boring sense and that all memoirs, even memoirs of those world-historical figures who have earned them, are already fictive, in the interesting narrative sense. But the confessedly fictive memoir erases the relevance of any claim to the ‘how things really were’ suggested by “memoir” -- Hawkes’s Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade, Barth’s Once Upon a Time, Eggar’s Heartbreaking Work Etc, and now Shorter Prose. They earn their status not as memoir, but as fiction. Sorry, but who cares to read your life if you’ve not written your life well?
And Sarki has written his life well. This is how well: I would like him to write my memoir, my memories, my recollected experiences I’d sooner forget but can’t. Reading the first piece, the longest piece, the most reflective piece, “Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion,” left my mind wandering to my own unwritten memoir but it would not have been an A&P or Kroger’s but a Piggley Wiggley in Americus, Georgia, where I cashed my Pig Check every week--$25 per and then $40 per--for doing the Lord’s work and so I could buy my groceries and the manager once cashed a check from my supportive parents because ‘It’s good to help out these folks who are doing the Lord’s work.’ The final piece, Max Lane, left my mind wandering to my own unwritten memories of dirt farming grandparents and mourning that none in my family ever had talent enough with the pen, as Sarki does, to properly commemorate and memorialize that dusty twentieth century experience of working an unwelcoming and fallow land. The second piece, “A Different World from Olive Listed’s,” I must confess I didn’t read because my mind wandered to my own playground and school and my own confrontation with a bully I was already guilty of having provoked, about my own ineptness in dealing with strange kids my age whose lives I was too young to imagine myself into.
The deceptive simplicity of Sarki’s writing, leading one to think, “I could write like this, I should write like this; I feel like were I to write a ‘Fiction -- Memoir’ it would sound like this, because this is what my memory feels like” cannot be to underestimate the ease through which one falls through the words and the sentences into memory, real and invented. It is neither audacious nor stupid (a big word and a small word) to find a voice written upon a page which might well be one’s own if one had only found it first. But Sarki did and I’ve no doubt that, should he not be capable of writing a memoir on my behalf, he has yet many such pieces remaining in the nib of his prose pen (and whether he’s a poet or not is irrelevant, since his prose is prose) which one might only hope will find themselves following these three short memoir fragments.
[please consider necessary disclosures made; a pdf was provided me by its author with no string attached]
And Sarki has written his life well. This is how well: I would like him to write my memoir, my memories, my recollected experiences I’d sooner forget but can’t. Reading the first piece, the longest piece, the most reflective piece, “Ponzil, the Pistolero, and his Comedy of Combustion,” left my mind wandering to my own unwritten memoir but it would not have been an A&P or Kroger’s but a Piggley Wiggley in Americus, Georgia, where I cashed my Pig Check every week--$25 per and then $40 per--for doing the Lord’s work and so I could buy my groceries and the manager once cashed a check from my supportive parents because ‘It’s good to help out these folks who are doing the Lord’s work.’ The final piece, Max Lane, left my mind wandering to my own unwritten memories of dirt farming grandparents and mourning that none in my family ever had talent enough with the pen, as Sarki does, to properly commemorate and memorialize that dusty twentieth century experience of working an unwelcoming and fallow land. The second piece, “A Different World from Olive Listed’s,” I must confess I didn’t read because my mind wandered to my own playground and school and my own confrontation with a bully I was already guilty of having provoked, about my own ineptness in dealing with strange kids my age whose lives I was too young to imagine myself into.
The deceptive simplicity of Sarki’s writing, leading one to think, “I could write like this, I should write like this; I feel like were I to write a ‘Fiction -- Memoir’ it would sound like this, because this is what my memory feels like” cannot be to underestimate the ease through which one falls through the words and the sentences into memory, real and invented. It is neither audacious nor stupid (a big word and a small word) to find a voice written upon a page which might well be one’s own if one had only found it first. But Sarki did and I’ve no doubt that, should he not be capable of writing a memoir on my behalf, he has yet many such pieces remaining in the nib of his prose pen (and whether he’s a poet or not is irrelevant, since his prose is prose) which one might only hope will find themselves following these three short memoir fragments.
[please consider necessary disclosures made; a pdf was provided me by its author with no string attached]
May 12, 2013
Words are what we've got.
What else lives as long as words do?
Sarki takes the English alphabet as a bolt of fine cloth and stitches together words, thought and meaning. I imagine that just as Michelangelo could look at a block of marble and see the statue as plain as it was before him, Sarki also could look at the keyboard of characters and imagine these three beautifuly written stories.
"We are certainly shaped by our initial impressions, are we not?" Sarki's narrator asks in the book's first story. I believe we often are, and in the case of Sarki's prose, I am one of his readers who is sufficiently impressed and hopes to be reading more of his fiction in the future.
What else lives as long as words do?
Sarki takes the English alphabet as a bolt of fine cloth and stitches together words, thought and meaning. I imagine that just as Michelangelo could look at a block of marble and see the statue as plain as it was before him, Sarki also could look at the keyboard of characters and imagine these three beautifuly written stories.
"We are certainly shaped by our initial impressions, are we not?" Sarki's narrator asks in the book's first story. I believe we often are, and in the case of Sarki's prose, I am one of his readers who is sufficiently impressed and hopes to be reading more of his fiction in the future.
April 22, 2013
Always good to see the sort of prose written by people you get to know on here, people you interact with in terms of reactions to books, so when you read an eBook by one these goodreaders you can't help but see their writing through the scrim of the writer's apparent favorite writers, in this case Bernhard, Sebald, Walser, Auster, Lish. Three first-person deep POV narrators -- that is, stories told from a perspective cranked upside the narrator's head, particularly in the first story. The second involved littling, a Lishian word, sort of. Images abound and the temptation is to call them Sebaldian, although images must have been included in other deep POV slant memoir prose of the past, right? In general, an often pleasurable and pleasurably beguiling read, especially recommended for fans of real yet subtly skewed glances at life lived and filtered through the freshest/purest lit.
May 25, 2013
Sarki’s poetry, which is all I’ve read by him up until now, looks sparse on the page.
But it’s dense.
I might liken the poetry to a field where Sarki has spread a thick layer of manure,
and then just walked away.
I’m left to plow through the manure and rescue the few words that haven’t been smothered.
The few words that have taken root and survived.
They almost seem mutant, these few words that poke up out of the shit.
Grinning their shit-eating grin.
There’s not an obvious reason why any of these words should find themselves together here,
in Sarki’s poems.
I have come across them
and re-collected them.
That is all.
Sarki’s prose is different.
With the prose, it feels to me like Sarki is plowing the field himself.
He comes in the night,
and he spreads the manure
and now, in the morning, he calls me up,
says, come over,
I want to show you something
and he plows on ahead of me,
at an alarming rate,
with no pattern at all to the manner in which he tackles the field,
leaving me to zigzag along in the grooves behind him.
And in spite of how dense the prose appears on the page,
with Sarki ahead of me on this project
it feels less like plowing through something thick
and more like skirting across the surface of something,
like water skiing on a lake,
with sea monsters in it.
Or like being pulled along in a rickshaw
by a mad driver
who is looking for an address that he can’t really remember,
but damned if he is going to stop and ask for directions,
because he’s tried that before,
and these dimwads who surround him
and pretend to have clues as to his whereabouts
haven’t got the first notion of where it is that Sarki is travelling,
or where his is bound
anymore than Sarki knows where he is bound.
Anymore than any of us knows where we are bound.
But it’s dense.
I might liken the poetry to a field where Sarki has spread a thick layer of manure,
and then just walked away.
I’m left to plow through the manure and rescue the few words that haven’t been smothered.
The few words that have taken root and survived.
They almost seem mutant, these few words that poke up out of the shit.
Grinning their shit-eating grin.
There’s not an obvious reason why any of these words should find themselves together here,
in Sarki’s poems.
I have come across them
and re-collected them.
That is all.
Sarki’s prose is different.
With the prose, it feels to me like Sarki is plowing the field himself.
He comes in the night,
and he spreads the manure
and now, in the morning, he calls me up,
says, come over,
I want to show you something
and he plows on ahead of me,
at an alarming rate,
with no pattern at all to the manner in which he tackles the field,
leaving me to zigzag along in the grooves behind him.
And in spite of how dense the prose appears on the page,
with Sarki ahead of me on this project
it feels less like plowing through something thick
and more like skirting across the surface of something,
like water skiing on a lake,
with sea monsters in it.
Or like being pulled along in a rickshaw
by a mad driver
who is looking for an address that he can’t really remember,
but damned if he is going to stop and ask for directions,
because he’s tried that before,
and these dimwads who surround him
and pretend to have clues as to his whereabouts
haven’t got the first notion of where it is that Sarki is travelling,
or where his is bound
anymore than Sarki knows where he is bound.
Anymore than any of us knows where we are bound.
April 28, 2017
This little gem of a kindle edition is available now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CFTDGSW
November 18, 2023
https://substack.com/home/post/p-1389...
It is difficult to rate your own book, to review it objectively. For no matter what one reads there is a life story, a history, ones working environment to take into account, and all the other books which came before and have proven to shape your reading patterns. I come to my own work the same way as I do with my paintings, my poems, and my photography and film. I have spent a great deal of my adulthood learning what it is that I like. If I cannot find it in the world I inhabit, I make it. But I see absolutely no need in adding more pieces to an already cluttered mix and landfill if the new work is not novel or better than something that has come before it. That was my concern about publishing these three pieces in the first place, and the reason why I still chose to do so. I feel this work is original. I believe in the words and pictures on the page. I think the book is beautiful and well-designed. I will give this book five stars because I do believe it took an act of courage to produce this work and a certain jeopardy at stake within the public domain.
I realize I have to be somewhat audacious to think I can work successfully in so many medias. I kid often with my three brothers on our personal delusions and our firm grasp on perhaps an alternative reality. But still, we all go on. Making the best of it and wishing for more. The three stories included in this collection are all true and somewhat false. Liberties have been taken. Memory, especially mine, is not to be trusted. But every one of these stories feels right to me. All of them an honest attempt to get at my truth. To be forthcoming. And to prove true enough to be trusted by my loved ones and acquaintances that I will always be fair.
I like these three stories very much. I believe they are good and worthy of the time it takes them to be read. It is my hope that this is only the beginning for me with prose. It has been my dream for the entire duration of my adult life that I would make of myself something that mattered in the literary world. I yearn that meaning in my life shall be multiplied and spread to those both close to me and others I have not yet personally met, nor probably ever will. I covet the proof required to be considered the greatest friend to all on the page where I believe it will always, and forever, matter until the end of all our days.
It is difficult to rate your own book, to review it objectively. For no matter what one reads there is a life story, a history, ones working environment to take into account, and all the other books which came before and have proven to shape your reading patterns. I come to my own work the same way as I do with my paintings, my poems, and my photography and film. I have spent a great deal of my adulthood learning what it is that I like. If I cannot find it in the world I inhabit, I make it. But I see absolutely no need in adding more pieces to an already cluttered mix and landfill if the new work is not novel or better than something that has come before it. That was my concern about publishing these three pieces in the first place, and the reason why I still chose to do so. I feel this work is original. I believe in the words and pictures on the page. I think the book is beautiful and well-designed. I will give this book five stars because I do believe it took an act of courage to produce this work and a certain jeopardy at stake within the public domain.
I realize I have to be somewhat audacious to think I can work successfully in so many medias. I kid often with my three brothers on our personal delusions and our firm grasp on perhaps an alternative reality. But still, we all go on. Making the best of it and wishing for more. The three stories included in this collection are all true and somewhat false. Liberties have been taken. Memory, especially mine, is not to be trusted. But every one of these stories feels right to me. All of them an honest attempt to get at my truth. To be forthcoming. And to prove true enough to be trusted by my loved ones and acquaintances that I will always be fair.
I like these three stories very much. I believe they are good and worthy of the time it takes them to be read. It is my hope that this is only the beginning for me with prose. It has been my dream for the entire duration of my adult life that I would make of myself something that mattered in the literary world. I yearn that meaning in my life shall be multiplied and spread to those both close to me and others I have not yet personally met, nor probably ever will. I covet the proof required to be considered the greatest friend to all on the page where I believe it will always, and forever, matter until the end of all our days.
May 16, 2017
Shorter Prose is identified as "Fiction—Memoir." The Japanese call it the ‘I-novel.’ The singularly most accomplished and virtuosic practitioner alive today is our beloved William T. Vollmann. Here, M. Sarki adopts the form to his own ends and leaves the reader to wonder where his past realities blur with his reimagining to unilaterally fantastic results. The three stories herein are concentric circles: “Ponzi,” the largest, housing “Olive Listed’s,” which, in turn, holds “Max Lane” as the indelible core. As this collection deals explicitly with the familial, one eventually comes to see these circles not as rings in a tree but as a single gun-target. The story that Sarki chooses to share of his upbringing reveals a sad but honest truth: the inherent problem with the nuclear family is the prolonged exposure to radioactivity.
“Max Lane” is doubtlessly the centerpiece of this collection—the metaphorical bull’s-eye of the above. It is a heartbreaking meditation on mortality, rendered all the more so by the stark and unsentimental writing. This isn’t fabulism, it’s reportage from the front lines. Sarki doesn’t deal in histrionics or logorrhea. When he writes about his Finnish grandfather making wooden bases for the kids to play baseball with on his property, you can be sure—to paraphrase that noxious Austrian—that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Don’t confuse this lack of clutter for artlessness. Something’s just preclude ornateness. Not all art requires framing, and gilding would just lessen its impact. Like this, the perfectly-phrased declaratives which total the complete opening paragraph of “Max Lane:”
“He came from Helsinki. Every day of his life he spent at work. Even with Helen waiting at home for him he worked. And in his pocket, he carried a silver watch. And then finally he died. And it was then when they counted them. Five toes combined. He was eighty-one.”
From there, a memoir-cum-paean to a grandfather we can never be sure to what degree is reimagined or real. Has he been sainted by death, all the rough edges of his living self worn smooth like a riverstone? It doesn’t matter. Sarki knows, and it is his privilege to keep.
“Max Lane” is doubtlessly the centerpiece of this collection—the metaphorical bull’s-eye of the above. It is a heartbreaking meditation on mortality, rendered all the more so by the stark and unsentimental writing. This isn’t fabulism, it’s reportage from the front lines. Sarki doesn’t deal in histrionics or logorrhea. When he writes about his Finnish grandfather making wooden bases for the kids to play baseball with on his property, you can be sure—to paraphrase that noxious Austrian—that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Don’t confuse this lack of clutter for artlessness. Something’s just preclude ornateness. Not all art requires framing, and gilding would just lessen its impact. Like this, the perfectly-phrased declaratives which total the complete opening paragraph of “Max Lane:”
“He came from Helsinki. Every day of his life he spent at work. Even with Helen waiting at home for him he worked. And in his pocket, he carried a silver watch. And then finally he died. And it was then when they counted them. Five toes combined. He was eighty-one.”
From there, a memoir-cum-paean to a grandfather we can never be sure to what degree is reimagined or real. Has he been sainted by death, all the rough edges of his living self worn smooth like a riverstone? It doesn’t matter. Sarki knows, and it is his privilege to keep.
April 16, 2013
I'm not a memoir reader, typically, but Sarki isn't your typical memoirist or autobiography artist. His impressionistic take on personal history offers a poetry of incident that is far more interesting than straightforward narrative of the sort usually found in this popular genre. What's true and whether that matters doesn't matter to me — even more so because I can appreciate the level of artistry at work here. Sarki is much more of a storyteller than you might surmise from his evocative, often elliptical poems. He's just as capable of writing "traditional" sentences that rattle and ring long after you've read them a second or third time. The included photography recalls Sebald, if Sebald had traversed the American Midwest growing up. If you're familiar with Sarki's short films and poetry, these prose pieces will provide a new perspective of this fine writer. If you're entirely new to Sarki's work, you'll still find much to impress here.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews