Soldan, William R. Lost in the Furrows. Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2020. $13.99. 113 pages.

http://www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com/books.html

Review by Nick Gardner

William R. Soldan’s Lost in the Furrows, is a collection of short and flash stories about the seamier types that exist in this fictionalized, rural Rust Belt town. While often these characters are seen as insular, caught up in the reiterations of addiction and violence common to the growing trend of “Grit Lit,” or “Gritty Realism,” Soldan imposes outside forces upon his characters, pressing them to question their limited, often patriarchal worldviews. Such questioning occurs in the first story, “Training,” when the protagonist squares up against his brother wondering if there’s “A chance for something else?” something beyond the fight and violence.

Though the characters in Lost in the Furrows rarely find a solution to violence, through them Soldan illuminates the misunderstandings that often exist between townies and impinging outsiders who attempt to overthrow or at least ignore the townie hierarchies. This is most evident when the fracking employees, a “‘Buncha loudmouths,’” invade the drug dealer, Elvis’ turf in “King of the Blue Rose.”  As the frackers colonize Elvis’ pool game and jukebox picks, Elvis is forced to protect his gospel music from the rabble rousers the only way he knows how, by starting a brawl. Of course, though it is uncertain whether Elvis, a pill dealer in the midst of the opioid epidemic, actually learns from or even questions his criminality and violence, his story captures a moment of change, of leaving his past behind him. Elvis had, “always planned to go places, and though he’d never given much thought to where, he knew his time had come.” His violence in The Blue Rose serves as a catharsis, a cleansing of his past life in a move toward freedom, from his violent life of crime.

There are many other examples of characters hoping to escape their murky and troubled pasts, and in a way the entire book explores this move from backwards to forwards, from destruction to success. In “Stairmaster” the protagonist works his way up from addiction, pondering “Without drugs, what other comfort can a person find in this world?” His story is a question of a future, a hope turned to faith that the future will be better. Similarly in “Across State Lines” the teenage protagonist rides shotgun with his alcoholic father and recalls his mother’s urging to “be better.”

However, growth and a move toward more positive futures is not always possible for Soldan’s characters. Set against a small-town Ohio landscape, Lost in the Furrows gives a voice to the lonely and the desperate, to those struggling in recovery, and to the victims of the opioid epidemic–not just the “suburban white kids.” In a sociopolitical climate that often others such outsiders, relegates them to an anti-intellectual crop of industrial fodder and conservative votes, Soldan’s book complicates these characters. It shows the way this hate and violence is systemic, ingrained bone-deep. He also tells us that at least some of these people want more. They just don’t want it forced upon them, only a bit of grace while they figure it out.

About the Author: Nick Gardner is in recovery from opioids and is a recent graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Bowling Green State University where he was an assistant editor at Mid-American Review. His poetry and fiction has appeared in Ocean State Review, Fictive Dream, Flash Fiction Magazine, Main Street Rag, and other journals. His book of poetry, So Marvelously Far, was published in 2019 through Crisis Chronicles Press. He lives in Ohio.