Cosmic Latte

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