Epiphany Book Kits

	Coming-of-Age Drama TWO FIFTEEN-YEAR OLD CHINESE STUDENTS decide they are in love, which is forbidden by both their parents and their school, as they are expected to be studying for their college entrance examinations. They ignore each other in the halls, then sneak away after school to hold each other in front of an unused console at a video arcade. They make promises. They stroke each other through their clothes and never talk about it, then run together through a fountain of invisible heavy-particle radiation with which the city power plant showers their town. The heat of their feelings makes them quick to laugh; climate change alters the jet stream, pushing the fallout into the lungs of a mother of three in a town miles south. The electricity remains on. In the blink of the arcade, the flush of blood in their cheeks, the teenagers crane their necks to catch glimpses of their beloved's nipples.
			Book Kit No. 1 is Nick Admussen's Movie Plots, a series of disorientingly absorbing prose poems that take thirty different film genres as points of departure for riffs on identity, the imagination, the meaning and coherency of life, and even more indefinable matters. They're fascinating and maybe just a little weird—like their ideal readers, perhaps.
	Murder Mystery A MOTHER OF TWO, MARRIED THIRTEEN YEARS and living in a Westchester colonial with a solarium and a two-car garage watches the docile, shaggy German Shepherd that her children named Mickey fall upon and deftly eviscerate an injured starling grounded in her backyard. She realizes that what she loves about the man she loves, his passion and confidence, the way he insists on her primacy and beauty and utility in his life, the satisfaction he takes in the way she ages gracefully and decorates his house, the feeling that he would fight ruthlessly to keep her well and next to him, his success in business, his ambition to be loved and worth loving, his authority over the children, his constant return to and ability with her body in sex, his manner of projecting health and strength, is all arbitrarily focused aggression. That she is complicit. That she is a feathered reward for the grudging obedience of a violent heart.

	Political Suspense IT WAS ST. LOUIS, IN THE DARK DAYS of the voluptuary emperor. He laid his steak knife on the kitchen counter; outside, there was a general noise of celebration as a brief shower of coins fell on commuters. The point of the knife stayed in place, but the blade and handle raised into the air, sweeping up, drawing an arc with the heel of the handle. A squall blew up and littered the sidewalks with bread. He had to get to work before work vaporized itself. The knife balanced, perfectly perpendicular to the formica, then continued to sweep its half-circle like an old-time dial on a descending elevator. No use going outside now, he thought, swinging his arms vigorously to get tired enough to sleep this out. It sleeted hot lead. Cults were founded to forgive us our debt. The emperor finally started wearing purple on television. The weather turned to hail and stayed real unmagical weather; the knife reached its basement, he reached his simple brown bed, and he will sleep there until the prophesied peal of alarm.
	Nick Admussen NICK ADMUSSEN's poetry has most recently appeared in the Kenyon Review Online, Barrow Street, the Mid-American Review, and Blackbird. He is a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, currently researching contemporary Chinese prose poetry and living in Los Angeles.






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