Black Tickets Book

If someone asked me to describe Flannery O'Connor as music, I'd refer them to classic blues and hard-edged folk like Son House and Leadbelly and early Dylan.

If someone asked me to describe Jayne Anne Phillips' Black Tickets as music, I'd sit her down with a playlist that included a narrow band of blues/post-blues tunes infused with rock and punk, like Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac doing I Loved Another Woman , Catpower singing Robert Johnson's Come on in My Kitchen , PJ Harvey doing Dylan's Highway 61, Catpower again doing Tom Waits' Yesterday is Here , Lightnin Hopkins doing Katie May and Frisco Blues, Rickie Lee Jones doing the Hendrix tune Up From the Skies, Patti Smith doing This Dead City.
Hard tunes, substantial and sad, close to the bone and tingling the flesh, mainly sung by women who have a way of making the substance occur as deceptively ethereal.

You could call it edgy, but it wouldn't capture the meditative, dream quality of these stories - it's as if Tarkovsky parachuted onto the set of an early Scorsese film. Highly condensed tales of dislocation and yearning and glimmers of transcendence, crafted as well as anything from the poets, it's fucking magic. It hurts.


a sample that doesn't give anything away, just a little glimpse of the ground Phillips covers here:

The sewing woman lived across the tracks, down past Arey's feed store. Row of skinny houses on a mud alley. Her rooms smelled of salted grease and old newspaper. Behind the ironing board she was thin, scooping up papers that shuffled open in her hands. Her eyebrows were arched sharp and painted on...