JR Fenn's Tiny Vessels contain expansive truths. Selected by Rita Bullwinkel as the winner of The Masters Review's 2024 Chapbook Open, the seventeen small fictions in Tiny Vessels hurtle backward and forward in time and space, all contemplating what it means to be human, to be alive and exist in our history, in our future. "To read these seventeen gem-like dispatches from a dreamlike world," writes George Saunders, "is to receive a lovely condensed version of what life on earth is like, and to be blessed with a feeling full of fondness and of longing for a kinder, more natural world." Intro Credits Dedication Foreword for Tiny Vessels by JR Fenn Memory Box Wind Horse The Cherry Tree Hedgies After the Natatorium Always Fumigation Day The Matchbox The Interstate Postcard from Infinity Transfer Central Schools Resolution No. 2153 Our Ancestors Dreamed, Too, in the Primordial Soup Green Walls Lit in the Night Altogether Tapestry Message in a Bottle Acknowledgements Outro Credits "To read these seventeen gem-like dispatches from a dreamlike world is to receive a lovely condensed version of what life on earth is like, and to be blessed with a feeling full of fondness and of longing for a kinder, more natural world." "JR Fenn's vessels are Fabergé eggs, mermaid's purses, and light-filled hulls. Each offers a window into a world both strange and familiar. Together they become an airship that moves from the heartbreakingly intimate to the startling and expansive. Fenn's stories are precise and wise, restrained and delightful, tiny but never small. An absolutely exquisite debut." "The vessels may be tiny, but the worlds contained in this collection are immense. These small stories ache and breathe and sing and dream, contemplating everything from the inside of the tiniest seed to the farthest reaches of the universe. With taut, poetic prose, Fenn's work captures the complexity and wonder of existing." "These stories are lush in both their everydayness and their strangeness. Even those rooted in the ordinary world read like dispatches from somewhere else, because JR Fenn has a way of cracking open what you didn't know could open. Tiny Vessels is a surprising and captivating collection-a dreamy delight from a writer I'll eagerly follow into any world she unearths."
