Willoughby, New York, by Carson Pytell

Prose, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Where are you from? Does it even matter to you? Whether or not you know it, it does. Wherever you are from, and whatever and whomever you encounter while there moulds you. We are all impressionable at least once in our lives, during youth. Some instances, some people, they'll bruise you up but then clear away in no time. Others, however, leave you wrecked and battered often without even realizing it. They leave you thereafter to live with scars indelible and invisible, especially when they ache or itch. "I love Carson Pytell’s work. It reminds me of Charles Bukowski and Fredrick Exley. It reminds me of Kevin Ridgeway and John Fante. It reminds me of the kind of fiction that a lot of us were trying to do when I lived and worked in Long Beach. So many of us who studied under Gerry Locklin and Ray Zepeda were going after a kind of gritty realism, and some of us accomplished the spirit and tone. Others did not. I never did to the degree that I wanted to, and so I shifted to different kinds of writing. Pytell, however, is a kind of master of this type of writing, and his fiction collection, Willoughby, New York, is a powerful work." —John Brantingham Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work has appeared widely in venues such as The Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Fourth River, and The Heartland Review. He is Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are Tomorrow Everyday, Yesterday Too (Anxiety Press, 2022), A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022), and Hate, Love, Hate, (Back Room Poetry, 2022).