Last night Northern Lights Books and Gifts of Duluth, MN threw a launch party for Anthony Bukoski’s North of the Port, his fifth collection of short stories. With these books, lovingly depicting the joys and heartaches of the Polish community in Superior, Wisconsin, Tony has achieved a well-deserved national following. While his writing is rooted firmly in regional culture, his themes of love, loss, and endurance, evoked by way of the everyday, are universal.

Yesterday at the Barker Island Inn in Superior, he read a story called “The Wally Na Zdrowie Show.” It is crafted as a personal letter in which the narrator, while trying to emphasize the good news, evokes the sadness of economic hardship in our region. Among other things, he contemplates selling the accordion handed down from his father. Without lapsing into sentimentality, Tony’s sure touch uncovers the many losses and disappointments that cling like dust to instrument’s yellowed keys. Another story, told by a regular at the Dirty Shame Saloon, ostensibly talks about the girls who visit the town’s bars selling roses. As he speak, the narrator’s own disappointed love emerges in prose as evocative as any poem.

Anthony Bukoski is the heir of Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio more or less established the American standard for the story collection chronicling the life of a single town. Like many heirs, Tony surpasses his predecessor. North of the Port is published by Southern Methodist University Press.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Book Event, regional literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.