Ferns and Foam Rubber by Juniper
Ferns and Foam Rubber consists of 10 short prose pieces, each of which is accompanied by a tattoo-like drawing of an anthropoid, but also insect-like, creature in various states of transformation. These drawings usefully provide an inroads for visualizing the book’s “characters” (Halifax, Narli, Shila, and its first-person narrator) who are either sprites, humans who have shrunk, or an altogether new species enduring earth on the way to its submergence in a detoxifying soup (the book's last line is “Bile will rise”). The book begins rainily in winter sometime after “the world changed.” Here, glowing mushrooms walk in the company of reindeer and the creatures around whom the “plot” transpires have lungs that are transforming into frilly gills merging with those of the pea pods in which they will soon hibernate: We hibernate in the pods during wintertime with anus and mouth tied together the way the mouth and anus of a fetus are tied together. During this time o...