While the speaker watches their family pulled into the sky, it’s a tangible loss, and they yank themselves from the grasp of their wife, calling for their cousins:Įvery word was spat dust, another cousin leaving my body. The speaker’s wife campaigns to rid themselves of this family burden, insisting it would be better to have them be adopted by other living families, even using her career as a storm chaser to try and run them off with a tornado, but the speaker has a much harder time letting go. The cousins insist on sleeping between the couple, chasing the mailman, and changing the car stereo. This effect is really felt in the story “A Chorus of Dead Cousins.” In this lyrical work, the speaker and their wife are plagued by dead cousins’ harmless, but annoying, hauntings. These ghosts are not the terrifying kind-they tend more often toward the tender and occasionally mischievous-but all of them hungry hungry for literal sustenance, for love, for belonging. This collection is riddled with ghosts moving through the stories we are confronted first with the literal ghosts of the lost and departed and then increasingly by the living haunting themselves and each other. Highlighting the crossroads of desire at once familial and physical, K-Ming Chang’s lyrical and deliciously experimental short story collection, Gods of Want, evokes a haunting sort of hunger.
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