Heather Fowler: Suspended Heart

Review by Bonnie ZoBell

Heather_FowlerHeather Fowler is Kafka in drag, an American Marquez. If you are looking for a safe little book, one that lines up neatly with other short story collections being published today, then Heather Fowler’s SUSPENDED HEART is not the collection for you. It is a book about the fervor of love, yes, but also about the devastation and danger surrounding such a seemingly pleasurable emotion. What really wins the reader over, though, is the way she tells the story.

The plots in these tales are magical, as in magical realism. Some poor girl in the title story literally loses her heart while down at the nearby mall. The local mall rats first notice it and then finally someone hangs it by a string between Bath and Body Works and Kleinfelter’s Jewelers with the hope that somebody will come and claim it. Couples make sojourns to the organ. If it throbs before them, it means their affections are true; if it stops, their love is false. “There were the rich and the poor, people on holiday, people on Quaaludes, people who drove to Coppendale on their last tank of gas and risked a failed return just to find out what they could not determine from the privacy of their own homes.” And then there are the colorful travails of the girl who lost her heart in the first place.

Fowler’s exquisite use of language means her poetic muse is ever present . . .

(read more on p. 15 of Gently Read Literature)