LITERATURE: Transition by Dorothee Lang

Finally got back to a bit of reading this weekend and I started with something tiny–micro, in fact–but huge in literary excellence.

Dorothee Lang is an editor, publisher, artist, and writer. She wears all her many hats when she travels and turns the experiences of her journeys into something like this. Transition is “a micro collection of stories + poems” as Dorothee describes it. I might tend to call it a collection of poetry. From the opening piece, Silver, we have:

And she kept dreaming of huge cities filled with streets filled with houses filled with colors and shadows.

The language between poetry and story is what bridges the gap of genre. What would differentiate them is the intricate placement and relative sparsity of words that Lang uses in her poems. headed is a poem that moves quickly, lines and directions pointing us through it, as stanzas themselves are arranged in carefully thought-out visual form.

The Sun She, The Moon He fairly sings to the reader. It is a vision of the world as seen through a small space of a window, but as with all of Dorothee’s work, there’s so much more beneath the surface.

The longest piece is the final one, a short story called Exchange Rates that hints of magical realism, of traveling in foreign places, of the differences in culture while man’s nature remains the same within us all.

There are more works included in this fantastic little collection. Oddly enough, while I sat reading it in the comfort of my own living room, I could see it as a great little book to take on a short trip. The pieces are just long enough, just short enough, to invite reading in short and thoughtful bits of time. The images last beyond the reading, when one would look up and think on the words as new things pass by in the windows. It’s a book about travel. It’s a book about being home.

Dorothee’s book can be obtained at her Blue Print Press site, where other fine publications are available, including her longer work, In Transit (which I’ll be reading and reviewing very soon), and work by Nora Nadjarian, and Michael K. White.

Transition is fine writing about moments caught in time. It is a lovely little journey between here and there.