After a busy summer that left this book languishing on my shelf for far too long, I finally completed The Missing Person by Alix Ohlin (of BCR #1 fame) this morning. I'm struck again by just how undeserving our little magazine is of the great writers we've had; we ask these people for the world and we offer nothing in return, and yet we get it. I hope someday soon our tax status is resolved favorably and a big-money grant comes through and we can become the paying venue we dream of being...but in the meantime it's been the sheer, naked generosity of writers like Ohlin who have kept us afloat.

Packed full with ecoterrorists, forgotten feminist icons, desert golf courses, dead fathers, and living mothers, The Missing Person is a remarkable book, alternatingly funny and car-wreck, can't-look-away horrible. There's a little passage near the end of the book that really gets at the heart of what this book is about, so I'll just quote that:

Which was worse, I wondered: enduring the wash of loss over your life, or surviving long enough to feel its ebb? Wylie thought I stayed away so I wouldn't have to feel the pain of it, but this wasn't true. I hadn't come home so I wouldn't have to recover.

I love that. The loss in my life, that's how it feels.

You should buy this book.