The Grief Lottery

Reading Becca Yenser’s new chapbook, The Grief Lottery, is like looking down into a trash-strewn alley and finding the glitters of hope and joy in the mere act of living.  These characters won’t meet you with an apology, but they’ll invite you into a moment of euphoria that burns out quicker than a sparkler on the fourth of July. Yenser’s truths are hard-edged and dangerous as the reader tunnels deeper into the lives of the disheartened.  Don’t be surprised if you’re cracked wide open, reassembled, and disarranged. Unsettled, but deliciously so. Yenser’s prose attacks and breaks you down, while it heals and comforts.

-Tommy Dean, author of Hollows

Harrowing, funny, honest, and stark, Becca Yenser’s The Grief Lottery is a sensation. The directness and brevity of these short short stories showcase the writer’s dynamic and gorgeous prose and their wonderfully mordant sense of humor. The language and sound are luminescent and act as gateway to a deeper place, where the best and worst of who we are is candidly revealed. The Grief Lottery’s stories are told with such fearless insistence, they read as though their narrators’ urgent truths must be recorded and shared before time is up. Yenser has written a fantastic book.

-Margaret Malone, author of People Like You