Winner of the Spring 2017 Black River Chapbook Competition
The landscape of Amy Sayre Baptista's Primitivity is mapped by cracked asphalt and dark woods, by broken bridges spanning greedy rivers, sunbaked dirt and ghost roads, sé ances held in gun repair shops, and retribution exacted in long grasses and hog pits and Segway tracks. These nine stories weave together a community borrowed from history and spanning centuries in a re-imagined Pike County, a geographical conundrum found in three different states yet joined by the same hungry river.
From strangers to spiritualists to families bound by love and blood, the characters who populate Sayre Baptista's stories tell tall tales of survivorship in the American south. To enter Primitivity' s pages is to arrive in a harsh yet beguiling topography of ghosts, thieves, and a hangman's lament.