Description:
With an eye attuned to the minute details of mundane life, Joan Fay Cuccio directs her poetic voice to a hardscrabble story. Darcy, the protagonist, stands in a phone booth and "thread(s) the coins through again and again in a small song, getting the number right on the third time, letting the call hook up. You are waiting outside smoking a cigarette against the heat of the day. I watch you pacing the curb, hitching up your jeans on the narrow knob of your hips.... " The "you," we learn, is Frank, the violent husband she is fleeing--the same "you" to which the entire story is addressed. The Geometry of Love tells neither a pleasant nor an easy story. A moment in the present, an object, or the smallest gesture--washing her hands in a gas station bathroom--triggers memories of a hard past: her father's death, the subsequent hardships, her abusive marriage to the violent, mendicant Frank. In her first novel, Cuccio examines the simultaneity of love and abuse, humdrum and stolen pleasures, and a woman's process of integrating her painful past with the difficult choices of her present.
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