Sea Dogs: Stories [Paperback]

John Bensko (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2004

Maybe it comforts you that the high seas and the romantic past are the only places you'll run into us, as if we're no more than pages in a book. Think again. We're no dream. I, Morales, am king of the pirates. I am at your doorstep.

Languid summer days and nights develop unpredictably in Sea Dogs, John Bensko's imaginative debut collection. He takes us from the remote interior of Mexico to the streets of New York, and lingers in the harbors and beaches of the coastal South. In the least likely places, the absurd and mysterious mingle with the ordinary, and Bensko's emotionally adrift, quirkily obsessive characters find the connections they never knew they needed.

A mother discovers her distant, retiring young son's secret collection of eerily beautiful insect corpses. A blind man proves himself a preternaturally talented fisherman, humiliating a guide who doubts his skill. And in the title story, a security officer at the Statue of Liberty who spends his days rescuing panicky visitors halfway up the stairs considers himself a swashbuckling pirate.

With charm and subtle wit, Bensko's stories seamlessly shift from the real into the fantastic and reveal the magic and mystery that simmer just beneath the surface of our lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A veteran poet, Bensko has received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and produced three books of verse (The Iron City; The Waterman's Children; Green Soldiers). He turns his attention to fiction in a debut story collection that is limpid and dreamlike at its best, but too often gloomy and detached. As the title suggests, nearly all 13 stories feature characters drawn to the ocean, whether by profession, disposition or circumstances. In "Painted Animals," a writer named Janice moves to north Florida and immediately regrets it, seeing the "line of green mold that had crept up the side of the house like the wave mark of an invisible ocean." When Eveline, her new neighbor, makes strange remarks suggesting that her sons lived and died in the house, Janice is forced to paint each room to claim it as her own. "Tequila Worms" tells the story of Prentiss, a young crewman on a tourist fishing boat. His easygoing job changes course when the boat takes on a group of strange passengers, led by a blind man with inexplicable skill at fishing. "Sirens" returns to the theme of fishing, featuring a widower named Washburn who has moved to Florida to hang a pole over the dock and forget his sorrows. He's confronted by a young woman who tells him over and over again, "I think you're wonderful," though Washburn has no idea why. After a while Bensko repeats himself, as nearly every story is built around the water and an inevitable encounter with an odd character. But the ongoing sense of mystery is also the strength of the collection, which provides no easy answers in exploring the loss and aimlessness that pervades these peoples' lives.
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From Booklist

In his first short-story collection, poet Bensko crafts tales that seem aboveboard and shipshape, but which veer unnervingly off course without notice, subject to treacherous currents and sudden storms. Echoing another recent debut, Hannah Tinti's Animal Crackers [BKL Mr 15 04], Bensko postulates troubling interactions between humans and animals, a focus indicative of our conflicted feelings about being in some measure responsible for other species thanks to our enormous environmental impact. Water is a constant presence, as is death. A woman new to Florida moves into a house in which animals painted on the walls of a bedroom memorialize two drowned brothers. A night fisherman catches a Florida panther. A captured scorpion causes havoc at a crummy San Antonio motel. Much to his divorced mother's dismay, a boy is obsessed with collecting insects. A woman working in an oyster-canning plant remembers her dead. Imaginative and deeply attuned to the resonance of myth and metaphor, Bensko constructs concise dramas in which the banal collides with the ineffable, and people experience abrupt and transfiguring change. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; 1ST edition (May 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155597399X
• ISBN-13: 978-1555973995
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,870,871 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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