My Worst Ideas - Michael Jeffrey Lee

My Worst Ideas by Michael Jeffrey Lee / ISBN 9781943679188 / A small 135-page paperback (4.5 x 6.5 inches), published by Spurl Editions *** With dissonant black humor, Michael Jeffrey Lee explores a sense of dislocation and mounting unease in this new collection of dreamlike short stories. In the final story of Michael Jeffrey Lee's My Worst Ideas, a disembodied voice asks the narrator to write him a story. The voice asks the narrator to include "my jingle-jangle voice, my queer way with words. My general philosophy." Strange jingle-jangle voices fill Lee's new collection, mumbling to each other as the text, full of uncanny and unsettling repetitions, builds into a fugue. Lee's characters are unable to get comfortable; they don't feel at home in their cities, their relationships, or even their bodies. With dissonant black humor, Lee explores their sense of dislocation and mounting desperation. In one story, a lonely young man carries a pigeon's headless body in his pocket that warms wh