If You Wave a Chicken Over Your Head
is Alison’s collection of very short stories
published by Red Bird Chapbooks.
Each story of one thousand words or less in Alison Morse’s If You Wave a Chicken Over Your Head offers a tiny universe. Here, original voices bring their distinct circumstances and compelling troubles to life with honesty and humor. We embark on a wild and glorious ride, immersed in perfectly rendered specificity: food and drink; art supplies; ancient and contemporary history; multiple Jewish cultures; popular music; and climate change. Across time and geography, these characters each seem to wonder: how can one live out goodness in this eternally flawed world? Thankfully, Morse offers no easy morality or pat answers. Instead, her rich images and intimate details add up, and the work is elevated: each line a captivating poem, every story an illumination.
—Beth Mayer, Editor of If You Wave a Chicken Over Your Head