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Welcome to the strange, fertile world of Vanessa Gebbie’s imagination in this collection of irreal flash fictions, in which little makes sense and yet everything does. A sea lion learns to fly. A man wakes to find his head is triangular. Babies talk. Sextants grow inside a man’s chest. Bella’s iron tablets work rather too well. And Daphne grows bonsai in a plethora of odd places. After all, the world keeps turning, and people occasionally do strange things – but then, that’s life, and life is nothing to worry about … Or is it?
In Vanessa Gebbie’s new chapbook, Nothing to Worry About, the body really is a wonderland! Gebbie’s brand of surrealism hinges on bizarre manifestations of the physical body—a wife turns to metal; a wife is dropping “pieces” of herself all around the house; a wife’s body becomes a flock of birds with her heart at the center. It’s deceptively light-hearted but hints at deeper metaphors around identity—are we our bodies? Or are they just fleshy appendages with their own agendas? Gebbie manages to get at the heart of this paradox with a wry little smirk on her face.
Nancy Stohlman