Daniel Grandbois will give a reading and a presentation on hybrid genres

7 pm tonight

Sacramento State’s Library Gallery

A mirror, an apple core, a termite Queen, a snowman, a blind cat, a hand, and a growth on Aunt Mary share protagonist positions in his unusual collection, Unlucky Lucky Days. It can’t be unquestionably located within either prose poetry or flash fiction, or given an NC17 or a G rating.  The book defies classification much like its author, Daniel Grandbois, who at 7 pm tonight makes it to Sacramento State’s Library Gallery to give a reading and a presentation on hybrid genres. His writing has appeared in such journals as Conjunctions, Boulevard, The Mississippi Review, and Fiction. Also a musician, Daniel Grandbois has played in three of the pioneering bands of “The Denver Sound:” Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly. He has an upcoming book entitled, The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, which I am expecting will also defy genres.

Inexplicably divided into sections demarcated by the days of the week, the seventy three stories in Unlucky Lucky Days are like the skein of yarn in the book’s opener: wound and unwound, pulling themselves along searching for nothing in particular. Like bedtime stories gone wrong, the language exhibits a fairy tale quality, encompassing once-upon-a-times and ever-afters in a new framework. His story, “The Mansion,” begins: “There was once an executioner in retirement. A large turtle he was and happy to have finally moved from town to the country.”

The pieces are suspended, its startling combination of words and images at once obscuring and revealing meaning for the reader. Grandbois succeeds in creating new revelations from the previously cliché, for example, in “The Horse:” “A husband and wife fell off a horse and refused to climb back on. The husband cited the horse’s sagging back; the wife, its short fuse. The husband called the horse a cow; the wife, a jackass.”

Full of humor and irony, but also Core Truths, each tiny story reveals an author’s way with language that escapes most average writers and will profoundly affect only a choice number of readers who allow its strangeness to invade them.

Unlucky Lucky Days By Daniel Grandbois BOA Editions, Ltd., $14.00, 119 pages

Perhaps I’ll see you at the reading tonight!