The Paper Coast
Jefferson Navicky
ISBN 978-1-947980-09-9 174 pages $16.00
In Jefferson Navicky’s The Paper Coast, we find the vicissitudes of translators and sea captains; flotsam and fonts; swans and wax cylinders and burials at sea. Sometimes ghostly, sometimes arch, sometimes laugh-out-loud scatological, its stories hold the scent of salt, pine, and ether; of coffee, old books, and sardines. To read The Paper Coast is to immerse in the librarial alchemy of Borges crossed with the profane whimsy of Brautigan, infused with Dickensonian flint and slant, the blue and brume of a certain coastal Maine. Navicky’s tales are curious, beautiful, transcendent. His sentences are luminous.
Megan Grumbling, author of Booker’s Point
How I loved meandering up and down this fog-laden Paper Coast with Jefferson Navicky. His characters—shadow creatures—stilled me with their strange secrets and yearnings, and their fragmented visions and obsessions—time, memory, ghosts, wolves, islands, books from the past—blended into a mysterious and haunted and thrilling whole.
Robin MacArthur, author of Half Wild and Heart Spring Mountain
Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned a B.A. from Denison University and an M.F.A. from Naropa University. He is the author of The Book of Transparencies (KERNPUNKT Press) and the chapbooks Uses of a Library (Ravenna Press) and Map of the Second Person (Black Lodge Press). His work has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, apt, Hobart, Tarpaulin Sky, and Fairy Tale Review. He is the archivist at the Maine Women Writers Collection and teaches English at Southern Maine Community College. Jefferson lives in Freeport, Maine.