Many writers are content to light one or two well-placed lyrical firecrackers in a short story. Others, like Mark Anthony Jarman, set off entire fireworks displays on every page. 'Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing,' opens the visceral 'Burn Man on a Texas Porch, the first entry in Burn Man, an anthology of 21 stories culled from Jarman’s four-decade career. The rest of the story is, like many of Jarman’s tales, a hallucinatory rummaging through the mind of a broken man. After receiving skin grafts that 'didn’t quite fit,' the narrator fumes: 'Hate is everything they said it would be, and it waits for you like an airbag.' In Jarman’s stories and sentences, things seem always ready to explode ... The archetypical Jarman narrator is a bedraggled man dragging around a big aching heart. He might be a petty thief, a hockey scout, an addict or a bloodstained soldier ... When I read these stories, I scribbled down two names: Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. Then I turned to the book’s introduction, by John Metcalf, which speaks at length about the influence of both on Jarman’s prose. But let me be clear: Jarman is no mere imitator. He may have the crackling syntax of Hannah, Johnson’s gift for shocking yet poetic images, and the penchant for loners and misfits of both, but Jarman’s voice rings unique.
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