R. A. Scanzillo’s collection is divided between poetry and short stories, the latter recounting damage and loss with sharp, penetrating prose.

Scanzillo’s stories — most less than two or three pages— provide a powerful look at the everyday traumas of love, work and family that few of us escape in life. While the situations won’t surprise most readers, Scanzillo’s bleak, mordant style, her unflinching eye, and her terrifyingly total recall of those moments when everything falls apart will keep them turning pages.

“The Place,” for example, recounts a woman driving around town past places frequented during a former relationship. Each place brings a small memory, until the remembrances accumulate and “[s]he feels the cold and silence like an orphan without shoes or shirt on.”

That sense of absence is also explored in “The Morning,” in which a woman struggles through a day with her father in the hospital, gravely ill. The next morning, a nurse calls, telling her to come back; her father’s gotten worse. Later, she remembers “the toothbrush, the lipstick, and a brush through the hair” that delayed her leaving home by seconds, just enough to miss her father’s passing. “Who had been there to witness the last three catch breaths?” No response. The pretty nurse’s natural compassion, a practiced sympathy. No response. Everybody in the room was already dead.”

While the stories gain much of their power from what the narrative leaves out, thus concentrating resonant detail of the lives examined, the poetry, oddly, begs for expansion. For instance, “My Chimera” begins, “The face/ Trace elements/ Composite/ Afixed/ Framing expectation […]” This isn’t simply slender, it’s anorexic. If the stories are tone row intricacies of Schoenberg, the poems are one-finger Chop Sticks.

Although the poetry disappoints, the stories command attention. Here, the common is made strange, wondrous or threatening by a sureness of detail and an iron-willed control of sentiment and sympathy. Readers won’t close the book unmoved.

Also available as an ebook.