By Shann Ray
Graywolf Press, $15.00, 185 pages
ISBN 9781555975883

“Everyone who has ever come here, remains” writes Shann Ray of Montana, as both warning and praise.  This uneasy truth dwells as the central conflict of the characters in Ray’s lyrical collection of stories.  These men, and to a lesser extent women, remain torn between accepting and rejecting a home suffused with beauty, but also with stagnation.

As the title indicates, these characters are also preoccupied with what it means to be a man, specifically the sort of man lionized in the myths of the American West. Mostly, readers bear witness to the fallout of attempting to meet that ideal. These attempts manifest themselves in emotional repression, loneliness, uncontrollable anger, and in many cases alcoholism, abuse, suicide, ravaged families and eroded love.

“In Montana, skies run from a tilted wooden porch all the way to the horizon line, and nothing keeps back the dawn.”

The reality these characters inhabit is grim but also starkly beautiful. Poignantly recounted by Ray, the stories read as elegies, both for the damaged lives of the characters and to Montana itself, which is no longer what it used to be (and maybe never was).

Reviewed by Ariel Berg