The narrators in the heartbreaking chapbook, The Sky Is a Well & Other Shorts, are all in search of something–comfort, nuturing, and, perhaps most of all, mother love. These are small girls, young women, adults with children of their own, who yearn for that moment of connection felt so keenly between parent and child. It is a feeling so hard to describe and yet Smith does so evocatively in her explorations of pinning down that moment of connection, or more often, that moment of loss in which the connection is gone forever.

I’ve read many of these stories separately before and loved them, but find them even more moving as they are here, in this collection. Each builds upon the next and while there is certainly a sense of melancholy within the whole, there is also a brilliant kernel of hope, of how she, the narrator, finds her bliss and that is within her own child.

You will be moved by these stories. Read them.