Polonaise

by Anthony Bukoski

The twelve stories in Bukoski's third collection are both a dirge and an homage to a passing way of life for the East End neighborhood of Superior, Wisconsin. "Hurry, our closing is imminent," a priest in the single remaining Catholic church exhorts a Polish emigre seaman at the start of a confession. On the streets and docks of the world's most inland port, Bukoski's characters struggle to understand what went wrong in a city where everything is closing or decaying. Sailors return with diseases of body and soul, a frantic woman searches for her child lost almost a half-century ago, a self-deluded widower seeks love over the telephone, and a compulsive braggart shrinks in stature as his chest expands with the ever more elaborate lies he tells.