USEREVIEW 015 (Capsule): Swimmers in Winter
Faye Guenther
Swimmers in Winter (Invisible Publishing, 2020)
ISBN 978-1-988784502 | 208 pp | $19.95 CAD
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Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter (Invisible Publishing, 2020) has a title that accurately bespeaks its tone — there is a chill to these three sets of paired-off stories that is, by turns, invigorating and lulling. But there is also a clarity in the prose, like cold water free of rose-eyed summer. Though this is Guenther’s debut collection of short fiction, it feels decidedly seasoned without lapsing into cynicism, instead examining and re-examining characters who are not the same, yet all share certain commonalities: they are queer, working-class, self-contained women who are finding ways to navigate the intimacies of age, shared space, emotional collapse, and something far more surprising and destabilizing in the collection’s final story that I won’t give away here.
Recommended excerpt:
Read “Things to Remember” and “Captive Spaces” back-to-back and you will be amply rewarded by the stories’ rapidly expanding inner world.
