An Inventory of Abandoned Things
Winner of the 2020 Fiction Chapbook Contest
In Kelly Ann Jacobson’s An Inventory of Abandoned Things, winner of the 2020 Split/Lip Press Fiction Chapbook Contest, there are cockroaches in the walls and anoles trapped in the doors. Squirrels roll across the attic rafters, and red ants patrol the car floor. A lazy gopher tortoise chews lettuce in the neighbor’s butterfly garden. At once the story of a pregnant graduate student separated from her wife and an inventory of the Florida panhandle, this book of linked stories questions what it means to fight the land for a place in it—and whether, in the fighting, there can be a bond between human and landscape formed that is stronger than love.
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In a Florida landscape crawling with zombie cockroaches and lit by emergency hurricane candles that stink of rotting fruit, Kelly Ann Jacobson’s remarkable An Inventory of Abandoned Things chronicles the undead, the unborn, the murderous impulses that exist within us, and the survivalist’s instinct to persevere through swamp and murk. A tender, wicked collection of stories from a wholly original voice.
––Karen Tucker, author of Bewilderness
In An Inventory of Abandoned Things, everything is alive. The narrator battles against invaders encroaching on her Florida house–cockroaches, squirrels–at the same time that she grows a daughter inside herself. Kelly Ann Jacobson’s careful attention to detail and her ability to capture the tension in every human interaction combine to make a chapbook that is at once bittersweet and captivating.
––SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods and Marriage of a Thousand Lies
Kelly Ann Jacobson’s An Inventory of Abandoned Things catalogues our profligacy and parsimony in our reckonings with the world. Through a series of linked flash fictions, the narrator walks a precarious but necessary tightrope–balancing her need to protect her life, her home, and those whom she loves with the liberating necessity of relinquishing her fears for a larger and more expansive, albeit riskier, life. At the heart of this collection is the narrator’s relationship with her daughter, from pregnancy to early toddling, and consequently, her daughter’s own relationship to a world that is simultaneously cruel and wondrous, invasive and thrilling. Jacobson asks us to consider how we mitigate risk and shelter those we love from predictable dangers, but more importantly, also how we must embrace the thrill of unwieldy possibility.
––Kerry Neville, author of Remember to Forget Me and Necessary Lies
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Press
Review by Michael Lang in The Rupture April 16, 2021
Interview on Leslie Pietrzyk’s blog Work-In-Progress April 12, 2021
Most Anticipated Books of 2021, The Coil Magazine
Podcast Episode about the book on Gaze Into the Blue Light