Joy Passanante is the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Idaho. Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines including The Gettysburg Review, Short Story, College English, Xavier Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has won several awards for fiction, poetry, and script writing, including two fellowships and a grant from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. A fine-press collection of her poems, Sinning in Italy, was published by Limberlost Press in 1999, and her novel, My Mother’s Lovers (University of Nevada Press), was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Award for best fiction in 2002. Her stories and essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes four times.

Of course, the title bespeaks a central dynamic of the book. Passanante’s collection explores familial, romantic and physical absences; from the wounds left from old relationships (with lovers, family and friends) to the physical scars of breast cancer, her characters cope with these losses in ways that reveal both weakness and strength. The consequences of these conflicts rarely end in clear victories; instead, in the stories that do have a “happy ending,” her characters show readers the simple virtues in relationships (also how to practice) of endurance, compromise, and growth.

Maybe of even greater poignancy, the stories also deal with how these wounds were inflicted—how the absences that haunt came to fester in the characters. Simply, her characters desire greater knowledge, contact or intimacy, and through the attempt to fulfill—or even through that fulfillment—they come to realize that desire is not like a glass into which one can pour water. Like the narrator having an affair (apparently with full knowledge of her husband) with the young man who has helped with home repairs, many of the characters realize that initial satisfaction leads to further longing.

Besides having the ability to tell sharply rendered tales—and make no mistake about it, there are a handful of stories in this book that may surprise some readers with their candor and sensuality—Passanante has a poet’s touch for cadence and a sharp eye for detail. She is at home in a variety of landscape—those both exotically cosmopolitan and vividly Idahoan. She also has a sharp sense of humor; her dialogue bristles with believable wit.

Another fine book from Lost Horse Press (located in Sandpoint), The Art of Absence is a great read for those who are interested in characters who are exploring boundaries—boundaries defined by relationships, sexual identity and personal history. Passanante has created these conflicted characters for us in memorable prose; it’s a book that a reader will both enjoy and, perhaps, quarrel with—in other words, a book you won’t forget.

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Joy Passanante’s characters know each other too well. Most of them have given up their romantic illusions and have settled into complex partnerships riddled with irreconcilable differences. “Absence,” for example, is narrated by a breast cancer survivor who has an affair with a much younger man and keeps it no secret from her husband. Why should she, when part of her lover’s appeal is that he feels desire for her despite her lack of breasts—the kind of desire her husband can no longer claim? Passanante’s great strength is that she never oversimplifies; this lover’s interest in her has a perverse logic that reveals itself when he cheats on her: “The women changed in height, weight, hair color, even tint of skin, but they all had one thing in common: The looked like little boys, chests flat as plywood.”

Other romantic relationships in Passanante’s stories are similarly complicated. In “Voyeur,” a man watches his wife’s affairs from afar, wanting to know everything he can about her, for better or worse. When she confesses, it’s not what she’s done that upsets him but her belief that of all her men, he is the one who knows her least well.

Not all of Passanante’s stories are about couples. “Reginette Red” tells the tale of two sisters, one of whom can’t seem to stop getting involved in abusive relationships, while the other can do nothing more to help than accept this and be around to pick up the pieces when things implode. The collection concludes with “Only Sons,” in which the narrator describes the long-ago kidnapping and murder of a friend whose child would now be an adult. As she prepares to board a flight at the airport, she sees a young man who is about the right age to be her dead friend’s son. She hopes to see him smile, thinking that she would recognize him for sure if he did, but at the story’s end, she says, “I saw no smile at all, only its enduring absence.”

Passanante’s vision is bleak, her eye trained on loss. These stories don’t lead to despair, however, but rather to recognition of the ways in which our lives remain rich despite the absences that shape them.
 —Danielle LaVaque-Manty

AWARDS

ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award Finalist!

ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards—one of the most prestigious affirmations of work coming from the independent press community—has nominated two books by Sandpoint’s Lost Horse Press as finalists for Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction: Food Chain by Janet Kieffer and The Art of Absence by Joy Passanante. ForeWord’s Book of the Year Awards was established in 1998 to focus librarian and bookseller attention on the literary achievements of independent publishers and their authors. They share in the process of discovering distinctive books across a number of genres with judgments based on their own authority in each category and on patron/customer interest. Their decisions take into consideration editorial excellence, professional production, narrative originality, author credentials and the value the title adds to the category. ForeWord is the only review trade journal devoted exclusively to covering books from independent houses—ranging in size from university presses publishing hundreds of tiles per year to micro, POD and eBook publishers who may publish one title in a lifetime. Lost Horse Press books may be purchased online here or ask your independent bookseller to stock these and other fine Lost Horse Press titles.