Cosmic Latte

Orthodox Jewish teenager Levi, having been caught fishing pornography from a waste bin in a Brooklyn Park, is sent to reform school in Israel, his simple pious existence threatened when he meets moon-faced nymphomaniac Tzippy, resident of a nearby psychiatric hospital. Lonely seven-year-old third generation Northern Irish- Italian, Majella, finds solace in her collection of Barbie dolls when her father is murdered by terrorists and her mother is floored by grief, learning to deal with the horrors of the world through child’s play. East German opera aficionado, Silke, faces a life-changing decision when she wakes to find her American lover, Michael, stranded on the opposite side of an impenetrable but hastily thrown-up wall.
Here, deep tragedy rubs shoulders with sharp comedy as children come of age and adults come to terms.
'Each story is a multi-layered, deeply imagined piece of fiction, very often with the breadth and scope of a novel.’ Wales Arts Review
'Trezise very much speaks for and about her generation; she is honest, funny, perceptive and fresh.' Nuala Ní Chonchúir, The Short Review
'Cosmic Latte is 'a mix of oddball characters drawn in deft comic strokes, underpinned by sensitive insight into the more complicated nuances that drive their personal desires and ambitions.' New Welsh Review -- Publisher: Parthian Books
With her second collection of short stories, Rachel Trezise grants an authentic and uniquely illustrated voice to each of her compellingly complex characters. The trials and traumas described in Cosmic Latte are particular to the disempowered individuals forced to confront them alone. But what unites these characters is their peripheral existence, the emotional displacement that isolates them from their immediate surrounding worlds. Trezise’s use of place and movement is central to her effective portrayal of transient people. Immigrants, migrants, escapees and tourists, these characters’ psychological dislocations are paralleled by the physical ‘elsewhere’, their loneliness seemingly symptomatic of a failure to communicate with the comforts of a collective identity. Among the eleven central characters in this collection, we meet a horny Jewish teenager, a grief-stricken stag-party member, a south-east Asian immigrant denied his ancestral heritage and a resigned romantic separated from her family by a political wall made manifest. Whether they are geographical, generational, religious or cultural, Trezise explores the boundaries that limit human assimilation and self-possession. Though their attempts may often seem ineffectual – playing with toys, sexual encounters or criminal activity – the characters in Cosmic Latte still manage to display, in small ways, the universally unfailing motivation to survive a desperate situation. Cosmic Latte achieves a tone that is at once unapologetically tragic and momentarily comic. Trezise’s impactful prose is characteristically punctuated by her stylistic exploits, witty observations and punchy dialogue. -- Pearl Newton @ www.gwales.com