Book Review: Sing To It by Amy Hempel

This collection of short stories by Amy Hempel is short and melodic and the best way I can describe it is that many of the stories feel more like poems. Many are very short – the book is only 149 pages long but has 15 stories within those pages. There are stories only a page long and these in particular almost feel like they could be re-classified as prose poems. Other stories are just a few pages. These short-short stories are like snapshots. Like looking at a photograph and imagining a whole life for the person in the scene.

Some stories, it’s hard to say if we’re existing in the world as we know it. Fort Bedd or Greed seem to twist the recognizable world on its side. One of the longer stories, A Full-Service Shelter, (and this is only 10 pages long) has a lilting, repetitive style. Many of the paragraphs begin “they knew”, with the “they” shifting perspective as the story progresses. But in those 10 pages are life, death, and a heck of a lot of passion.

The collection is ended with its longest story, Cloudland. The true story of the Butter Box babies was known to me so it wasn’t hard to figure out where the story was going but the way Hempel has the narrator of this story circle around the heart of it is masterful. Like a tidal pool, the narrator skirts the edges of what she really wants to, needs to, tell us. Even this longest story is only about 60 pages but I found myself wanting to classify it as a novella because it contained so much.