Description
In “Unfinished Murder Ballads,” Darren C. Demaree takes moments and snapshots of moments and fractures of moments and creates entire worlds with them. There are universes in each page, there are longing souls and stalled hearts and mournful cries. There is pain and suffering and love. And there is, always, always, beauty. – Cathy Ulrich, author, “Ghosts of You“.
Like the lilac flowers flourishing over the (rumored) horse burial ground, Unfinished Murder Ballads grows beautiful even when “it feels monstrous.” With warmth and humor, Darren Demaree shows us an array of characters living and dying their ordinary lives. Each vignette wrestles with the narrative angel that human violence and tenderness are a matter of combined scale and spectrum. Demaree is a writer who can find, like a foot through an iced lake, “the one weakness in miles of strength.” This collection glitters with brief light; that light is language and how it holds us. – Hannah VanderHart, author of “What Pecan Light“
