The stories in Despy Boutris’ Burials represent a contemporary queering of the “rural Gothic”: a coming-of-age narrative that interrogates familial relationships, abuse, grief, guilt, trauma, and sexuality, in a pastoral landscape that can be tender and nostalgic and yet threatening underneath. The trials and tribulations of girlhood in a small town are complicated further as the narrator explores her sapphic desires—but what begins with secrecy in the narrator transforms into a space of solace and safety, and a refusal to be silenced or ignored within a heteronormative society. With rich and emotive prose that carries the sonic texture and rhythmic cadence of poetry, Despy Boutris expertly weaves a powerful account of the ache and awe of adolescence.
Includes the stories “Ars Poetica,” “Summer’s Lessons,” “Drought,” “Burials,” “Rewriting History,” “Forest Elegy,” “Tryst,” “What My Parents Taught Me,” “Portrait of an Alcoholic,” “Departures,” “Dinner Guest,” “Spring,” “Psalm with Passing Train,” “What I Want,” and “Note to Self”
