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+ Read the entire story at Smokelong Quarterly
+ Visit Casey Hannan’s site

An excerpt from Justin Sirois’ Falcons on the Floor appeared in Issue 13 of Dark Sky Magazine. A brief yet exciting blip of fine writing. In those few pages, he beautifully described a woman in an abaya riding on a rickety tractor toward two Iraqi young men, one of whom was severely dehydrated. I did not know anything about the novel as a whole, but the excerpt read like a short story. It was focused and intriguing and I would have been satisfied with just that. Now, having read the novel, I am relieved that I did not settle for just the excerpt. It was but a hint at the wonderful flavors that would prove to be a very satisfying dish.

At its core, Falcons tells the story of Khalil and Salim, two young Iraqi men who flee Fallujah on the eve of the first siege of the city, but the story unfolds through masterful language (provided in part by the book’s collaborator, Iraqi refugee, Haneen Alshujairy), revealing a multi-layered story of perspective, friendship, and loss.

I hesitate to call this a brilliant first novel. It is a brilliant novel. Sirois demonstrates a succinct mastery of active language that manages to strike a lyrical cadence. The prose is poetry at times.

What’s down there?

The black water says nothing.

Mute leviathans – stripped of pigment and devoid of conscience. The croon hungry, kindles as knives. And the river knows we’re here too. Sons of the river and sons of Baghdad, we’re here, and I know the drops leaking out of our armpits and eyelids were once molecules of the river. It smells us as we float, knowing our bodies belong to its ancient body. It won’t hesitate to swallow us whole.

At times the dialogue and action move so fluidly and with such grace that it feels like he is retelling a personal experience, or like he stumbled upon such a story, which just happened to take place on the eve of the sieges.

There are three ways to approach this book – though, if you choose to keep a singular view, you will limit yourself and miss out on a well-crafted story. You can take it as a war story (a neutral approach to a war story) that demonstrates the emotional and friendly ties that carry on despite the apparent violence. You could also separate the themes of friendship, love, and loss entirely from the sieges and you would still feel Sirois crafting a solid plot while pulling strings inside you. I say that the best way, the third way, to approach this book is to combine the two and let the intended story unfold. Don’t limit Sirois’ ability.

It would have been easy to take a story focused on the eve of the first sieges of Fallujah and construct from it a soapbox of sorts and stand on top of it and scream. But Sirois handles the story with delicate, yet seasoned hands and lets it live in the moment.

One interesting aspect of the book is the change in perspectives. The book opens with the story of an unidentified character telling of pining love and teenage awkwardness. The story is brief and leaves you, at first, unsure about its place in the rest of book. This becomes increasingly apparent as the proceeding pages tell the story of Khalil and Salim. However, the perspective shifts again from third-person omniscient to first-person as the book moves to the “Selected Word documents of Salim Abid.” The book then returns to the third-person omniscient before ending on the perspective of a U.S. soldier, perhaps the same character from the book’s opening chapter.

All in all, such points of view give Sirois principal command of the story. He exists silently as creator, carefully guiding your imagination through layers of internal struggle for each character and how these struggles unite them. He captures the vulnerable youth and fragility of pining love, the strength of friendship, and the way all can ultimately be lost.

In his “Introit,” Thomas Lynch writes, “If the English master, Auden, was correct, and ‘art is what we do to break bread with the dead,’ then the Irish master, Heaney, was likewise correct when he suggests that ‘rhyme and meter are the table manners.’”

I’m sure Lynch fully understood the truth in these quotes as they relate to The Sin-eater: A Breviary, but these words perfectly set you up for Argyle and his hunger for iniquities. In the book’s twenty-four poems, Lynch not only breaks bread with the dead, he guzzles their beer. This may seem an irreverent gesture, for Lynch only half listened to Heaney’s words. These poems do not rhyme and are written in what Lynch himself calls an “imprecise pentameter.” Lynch seems to have forgotten his table manners, and rightfully so. However, the language, the overall layout of the book, is “suited to the brief meditations and reliance on numbers and counts that were part of the churchy rubrics.”

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An earlier me would have read poems that referenced micro-shorts and text messages and immediately written them off. That earlier me would have lost out. The speaker in Lily Ladewig’s debut poetry collection The Silhouettes won’t let me pigeonhole her. She refuses to be predictable. These poems are fashion previews, but they are also history lessons. They are sometimes yoga meditations, and they are sometimes adventures in free diving. They are often French. And while they usually show us the silhouette, they always show us the body.

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Order your copy of Ark Codex as a pay-what-you-want PDF or a $40 full color book.

And check out an excerpt we published in DSM 15.