I was only seventeen, I was only seventy

I am reliably informed that The Fire and the Place in the Forest is celebrating its book birthday. Technically I may have edited this collection of short stories and poems by Jeannelle M. Ferreira, but that shouldn't stop you from acquiring posthaste these elegant, urgent, more often than not wittily written jewels of queerness and diaspora. It's a book of shape-change and holding fast, of finding the right face and knowing where between history and the future we can live and not merely be remembered. The parable of the title may be all we have, but the story it belongs to knows that's not nothing. Partisan songs, ghosts from the machine, skerries and the Pale of Settlement, all of it's here in the kaleidoscope and never the same tumble twice. Turn it a little; see what you get. S'iz a vunder.

The circle is always closing. In crazy times, this essential selection of the fiction and poetry of Jeannelle M. Ferreira holds out a branch of lights kindled from chosen futures and pasts always close behind, where history never confines itself to one familiar face and selkies and demons offer as much inheritance as memories, bodies, or ghosts. Intimately Jewish, integrally queer, these are tales for holding on to. They know how to remember and to change.