CROSSING OVER painfully returned me to those calamitous years, now a full generation past, with all the accuracies of a participant's historical memory. "Rose-stained bodies dumped in the chopper's gut." Poetically-bonded, gritty, vivid details with tersely understated emotion, thus might one characterize these articulate wartime vignettes.
Currey is humanely aware, collagistic, and associative. His tour as a Navy medic provided the insight for these understated & exceptionally tight narratives. His skills as a writer, honed in writing two solidly crafted earlier books about Vietnam, allow this book of fewer than 40 text pages to vibrate with the hideous corpses and limbs, the "legs that were not legs... that were glutinous mire, that were ooze." A resurrection of "every drowning ghost and airborne soul." A field notebook--beautiful and dreadful.--Joel Lipman
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
Contact the editor, luigi-bob drake, at Burning Press
Copyright Burning Press 1994, 1996.