Kim Chinquee's flash fiction at Butler Library

"Nurses watched the TV at the station. The patients didn't need much, and news was the ending of a princess. I'd finished someone's blood work and went to the labor room, although I wasn't in labor. There was rarely more than one delivery and it was where I stayed on call. It was Labor Day weekend..."

The opening paragraph of Kim Chinquee's "Farmer," one of many fictionalized accounts of her days as a lab technician in the late '90s following a stint in the Air Force, distills much of what is essential about her writing: the pervasive sense of distraction and dislocation, of meaning being generated serially and metonymically -- from sentence to sentence, as it were -- rather than from the top down according to some overriding master narrative, and the anxious, not quite yet foreboding sense that something violent or "grotesque" is about to occur to her working-class characters, although the concision of her prose precludes it from actually happening.

In the minimalist aesthetic of what has come to be known over the past decade as "flash fiction," Ms. Chinquee is a bona fide star, with over 200 publications in leading magazines and journals in her still young career. If the wondrous and amazing Lydia Davis (Samuel Johnson is Indignant and Variety of Disturbance) is the Chekhov of flash fiction, then Chinquee may be its Flannery O'Connor.  You could make the case for her multi-tasking, single working mothers and their anguished-but-clueless boyfriends/husbands as pre-Gothic: emblematic of an America of Wal-Mart shoppers and fast food diners where everyone is in constant motion, but no one seems to be getting anywhere.

Chinquee, a Green Bay native with degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, joined the faculty of Buffalo State College this past September. Her much praised collection of flash fiction, OH BABY, was published in February by Ravenna Press, and her collection of prose poems, BIG CAGES, is forthcoming from Buffalo poet/translator Dennis Maloney's White Pine Press.

She will read from her Henfield and Pushcart prize-winning work at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday (Nov. 12) in the college's E.H. Butler Library as sponsored by the Rooftop Poetry Club.  Also reading will be poet, critic and scholar Alessandro Porco, who is completing his Ph.D at the University at Buffalo on the subject of hip-hop poetics and American poetry.

--R.D. Pohl