Cheryl Dumesnil – författare

Previously considered the domain of bikers and a rite of passage in the services, tattoos have crawled out society's fringes and onto the ankles of starlets and the biceps of bankers. In this volume writers like Herman Melville, Elizabeth McCracken, Ray Bradbury and Sylvia Plath offer stories in which the full tattoo experience is brilliantly captured and explored. The modern tattoo industry is as comfortable on the mall as on the docks, with today's tattoo parlour denizens likely to be folks who work 9-5 or teach economics at the local college, and this collection pulls us into that alluring world, capturing the mysterious fascination this practice has for us and defining the emotions and intensity attached to being tattooed.

The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.