Unlucky Lucky Days

Customer Reviews

• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by Richard from Amsterdam, Netherlands | Jun 25, 2008
  

  “You must tell the truth,” said the tapeworm, measuring the reviewer’s guts.
  “But what is the truth?” squeaked the louse, perched on his ear.
  “And where shall we find it?” said the stone in his heart.
  But their voices were lost in a dense web of words, trapped for an instant on a flickering screen, before they were devoured by a ravenous click.
  “There, you see?” said the tapeworm, as he floated disembodied.
  “Is that why we must speak the truth?” asked the louse.
  “Is this where we shall find it?” asked the heart stone, knowing full well that the only answer would be the next question, which was already hard at work, drawing the arc of a smile under the reviewer’s nose.
  “Is this why we feel alone?” mumbled the smile. “Is this why we write?”
  But its words were devoured by a ravenous click.
  
  PS: We kindly request that you refrain from running in the Grandbois Gallery. Patrons are, however, encouraged to take one of the works home with them. But be warned: Counterfeiters will prosecuted to the full extent of the law!
  

  
  
   3 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by Ben from Chicago, IL | Aug 14, 2008
  

  Chock full of animals, vegetables and minerals, its oddly, yet wholly, engrossing and like nothing else you've read before.

  
  
   3 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 5 out of 5
  
  
  by John from Des Moines, IA | Oct 23, 2008
  

  UNLUCKY LUCKY DAYS, a debut assortment, is fabulist flash-fic of the highest order. Nothing in the book runs so long as three full pages, & in general the work eludes the social & economic demarcations of what we like call "realism." Instead it offers disturbing yet charming shards of unbridled imagination. In a typical metamorphosis, a brass lion’s-head knocker takes leave of its doorway, setting off to play middle-school pranks. All told, the collection divvies 73 surreal miniatures among seven sections labeled, as if Grandbois were a good Judeo-Christian, "Sunday" through "Saturday." Yet the sensibility comes across as pagan; spirits reanimate the world’s common clay. He can be gloomy, suggesting for instance the nightmare morning of 9/11, or he can be healing, turning the Inferno into a Tunnel of Love. Indeed, inspired reversals at the last minute distinguish nearly all these abrupt dream-loops, now childlike, now chilling. These DAYS can create a climactic rush via a well-worked lack of commas & they can arrive at ironies that supply rightness and closure. At their best, they push cross-cutting valences to peak intensity, then leave us gasping. Now, on occasion, there emerges a world we recognize. “Hat and Rack” might have to do with sexual secrecy (the final word is “closet”), and “The Sea Squirt” might make an environmental argument. But even when the stories lack such grounding, the writer negotiates the shoals of cuteness -- the obvious danger here -- masterfully. He may work with signifying wads of gum or, repeatedly, with articulate spiders, yet he nearly always strikes a balance between the ticklish and the haunting. Those wads of gum mutate into the Weird Sisters of Macbeth (indeed, this text is rife with others, everyone from Borges to Bob Dylan) & in the end they achieve the timelessness of geometry.
  

  
  
   2 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 4 out of 5
  
  
  by Jason from Chicago, IL | Jul 19, 2008
  

  (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)
  
  Regular readers know that I'm a big fan of experimental work, but that I always face a professional problem when trying to write reviews of such work here; namely, my reviews tend to be long and detailed analyses of the story being told, something almost impossible to do when the book in question is experimental or a collection of poetry or whatnot. And that's why my write-up today of Daniel Grandbois' new Unlucky Lucky Days is going to be so short and muddled; because I liked it, don't get me wrong, I liked it quite a bit in fact, but liked it for the same reasons I will sometimes like a certain book of poetry, which is something I in particular just find difficult to express in an analytical critique. In fact, it helps to think of the 73 chapters of Grandbois' book not as stand-alone narrative stories but rather highly abstract prose-poems; anyone expecting to be able to "follow along" with the book's events is just going to walk away disappointed, while those who wallow in the complex wordplay and striking mental images are bound to like it a lot more. It's a frustrating kind of book to recommend, because I have no good reasons I can point to as far as why you should check it out yourself, other than "ooh, it's weird and cool and I dug it;" nonetheless, I am recommending it today, but only for those who also like such authors as TS Eliot, Mark Danielewski, and Karen Finley.
  
  Out of 10: 7.9, or 9.4 for lovers of experimental literature/poetry

  
  
   2 people found this review helpful
  
  

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• 4 out of 5
  
  
  by Jason from Sacramento, CA | Jun 13, 2008
  

  I don't pretend to understand each of these little stories, but those that I do I really enjoyed. I hope my mild confusion was merely a result of an inadvertent line-skip while reading on the light rail, rather than some defect on the author's part. Perhaps these tales are really seeds, and some day soon their meaning will spring forth from my head, fully clad in armor.
  
  This is a brave collection: Bold strokes on a tiny canvas (for most stories fill less than a page, and a few are shorter than this review). Some are quite funny, and some simply are.
  
  But then this seems a collection to be read over and again – gleaning new meaning with each passing glance. And evoked – for me – the poems and drawings of Shel Silverstein.
  

  
  
   2 people found this review helpful
  
  

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