These citizens of Pottery Town, which someone wryly names Poverty Town, make full accountings of themselves through observation and interactions at a parade, a bank, in homes, apart¬ments, streets, stores, and cafés. Each story bubbles with history and place, sight, sound, and taste. Each creates a cinematic, richly detailed scene. The author leads us along store aisles, blind alleys, and misdirections to unexpected, yet satisfying conclusions. Henry David Thoreau's adage, found printed on a small pack of sugar, may say it best: "There is no remedy for love but to love more." Kotrba treats us to this. --Kathleen S. Burgess

Come meet the people of East Liverpool, Ohio, where life might sometimes seem small and antiquated, but in Karen Kotrba's assured hands, the internal lives of its inhabitants are revealed to be to be as large as entire worlds. The small town, blue collar lives that take focus in this collection of tenderly and smartly written stories tell the story of the passed over and left behind places in our contemporary American landscape.

--Christopher Barzak, author of One for Sorrow and Wonders of the Invisible World