Container
By Derek Fisher
Published by With an X, 2024
216 pages, paperback
In sold out stadiums, top recording booths, sounds of ripping steel, snapped elevator cables, shattering feedback, eardrum surgery, masses devoted until death, a music landscape possessed by this singular, multi-platinum colossus of scar and bone; an infamous architect, who travels the world with her young son, overseeing constructions of her work, ignoring reports detailing the increasing death toll in her buildings; your misplaced talking toy turtle, cute immovable smile, a lost death-squad insurgent; shy teenage girl, strict parental control, model student, raised to be a killer; climate change has been solved; global warming boils the earth; desert wastelands surrounding scorched ghost towns; Manhattan mega-condos turned into luxury orgy sanctuaries, above crowded human tunnels of infested waste, amid apocalyptic floods, drowning what's left of the city; my last shift, in the world's best restaurant, my curious eyes, my lacerated arm, my exposed cluster of wires, my new insides. These are the inhabitants and shadows, the glittering and decaying worlds of Container. 15 stories.
Praise for Container
"I imagine Derek Fisher's brain as a blackened tributary, fractured, seeping out in each direction, where the sacred, mundane, absurd, and horrific each find themselves a stream. His collection defies categorization, except that most every story ends in gnawing uncertainty." -Christopher Zeischegg, author of The Magician
"Reading Container feels like being stuck inside a luxury trash elevator that doubles as a trash compactor--bejeweled, carnivalesque, and ultimately crushing. In panoptic yet claustrophobic prose, with whiffs of Lovecraft and Borges, walls of impossible architecture cave in and floods fill the never-ending tunnels. Welcome to Derek Fisher's elegant dream of annihilation." -David Kuhnlein, author of Die Closer to Me
"Container is that secret little drawer in the garage where your dad keeps the rat poison, a blowtorch, his rusty switchblade, and some expired pills with the label peeled off. Except now there's a rabid opossum birthing babies in there too. And your dad isn't around to see it because he's wanted for manslaughter" -Claire Hopple, author of ECHO CHAMBER
