Voices Carry, by John Calvin Hughes

Prose, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The five stories in Voices Carry concern lost individuals. Wandering the blasted landscape of the modern South, these characters aren’t sure of who they are or who they should be. Or who they want to be: people at a crossroads, people who feel trapped, like a bug in amber, watching the world but at a terrible remove from it. They are people who can’t swim fast approaching the deep water.

These stories illustrate the hard drama of small moments. There are no lessons to be learned here. There is only the enactment of Faulkner’s famous dictum of “the human heart in conflict with itself”: a boy spending the night with his absentee father, a semi-literate piney woods poet, a woman struggling to remember the last word her lover said to her, a wife realizing that she cannot live the life her husband loves. The stories detail whole worlds in miniature.

John Calvin Hughes has published in numerous magazines and journals, including Dead Mule, Southern Indiana Review and Mississippi Review. His publications include a critical study, The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme (The Edwin Mellen Press); two poetry chapbooks, The Shape of Our Luck (Sargent Press) and Cul-de-sac Agonistes (Black Bomb Books); a full-length poetry collection, Music from a Farther Room (Aldrich Press); and three novels, Twilight of the Lesser Gods (CreateSpace), Killing Rush (Second Wind Publishing), and The Lost Gospel of Darnell Rabren (Bowen Press Books). His newest book, The Boys, was published by Regal House press in August 2023. He lives and works in Florida.