Lazy Fascist Press, 136 pages, paperback, $11.95

Sometimes reading a book is like entering a dream. J.A. Tyler’s Colony Collapse is exactly like that: a trip to an otherworldly location through words. However, more than an alien landscape or outlandish world, this narrative allows readers to enter a place that’s at once familiar and unearthly, soft and welcoming but also variable and dark.

In Colony Collapse, Tyler does away with traditional storytelling and instead constructs a narrative by joining together short chapters that tell a fable-like story about a man in the woods who deals with whatever comes his way, builds, destroys, and rebuilds house, and interacts with the animals that surround him. He has brothers and daughters, but they’re not what you might expect. The beasts that inhabit the woods are his siblings and, instead of action, what the reader gets are memories. The result is a book that dances on the line between poetry and prose, the immediacy of feelings and recollections and the insubstantiality of magic, desire, and the denial of death.

While this is a tale about deer-brothers, bear-brothers, daughters, and building houses, those are only the easily-imaginable and somewhat tangible things in which the narrative is anchored. The real elements of cohesion, however, are just as present and much more ethereal: memories, hope, love, an unending quest for stability in a ever-shifting world, and an devastating sense of loss:

“In this woods that are not woods anymore, there is an overwhelming sense of loss.”

Besides loss, there is sadness. Lots of sadness:

“I built gutters on this sixth house, but funneling down sadness is only burying trees into walls, is only opening the sky to full sun and never clearly seeing our deer-brothers.”

The mixture of sadness, defeat, and solitude might sound depressing, but Tyler’s prose possesses a beauty that, although it doesn’t fully cancel their gloominess, takes the edges off this feelings by surrounding them with poetry:

“To fall asleep I hold one hand in the other and pretend as if one of those hands is not mine but someone’s who cared enough to hold me. Down deep, longing is shaped like birds in trees.”

Colony Collapse is a short book that deserves to be read slowly so it can be savored. It’s both a testament to Tyler’s talent and proof that Lazy Fascist Press focuses on publishing excellent literature without worrying about genres. This is what poetry reads like when it sheds its clothes and walks naked into the woods.

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Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.