Gorgeously brutal, jaggedly mattering, Meg Tuite’s incantations crackle with the clarities of a true visionary. White Van treats the trample and grime of trauma withcleansing ecstasies of language. This book will turn you inside out.
-Garielle Lutz, author of Worsted I’m convinced nobody on earth writes with quite the same level of passion, verve, candor, dark humor, electric intensity, and heart as Meg Tuite. I’ve pronounced this collection my favorite of her works (and I have a bunch of them). Why? It’s the experience of reading it. You read the first sentence. Stop. Read it again. Shake your head. Read it out loud. Marvel. Feel. Look out the window. Read the whole tiny piece (a poem? a story? you’ve long since stopped categorizing these stunning mash-ups). You gasp, you sigh. You read more. You start to gobble these. You mark ones to go back to. Realize you’ve marked them all. A master, a maestro, Tuite is the kind of writer who can balance a jetliner-sized story on the tender tip of a blade of grass and not you or I or anyone else has a clue how she does it.
-Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works
The poems in White Van grind and seethe, they crawl from the backseat of the van down the block. With a withering tension, Tuite circles the globe of abuse, trauma, and memory, repurposing abduction as an inquiry into the psychosexual damage inflicted bodily upon young women. This is a hammer-hard voice, decisive in its ability to smash together the tragic and the familiar, the familial and the societal, the languages of both predator and survivor. A raw and urgent collection, steady in its honesty, as present in its performance as a siren.
-Colin Pope, author of Why I Didn’t Go To Your Funeral
Estranged bowels, ghost bones, mirrors, blades-White Van boldly confronts womanhood, the body, our insecurities and oppressors. Meg Tuite’s words will trap you in this winding, suffocating yet cathartic ride. It cuts right to the heart and is impossible to look away.
-Lucy Zhang, author of Hollowed
White Van is in Tuite’s terms a ‘predarectomy’-the removal of the predator. The book follows the ‘endless line of girls’ who have ‘stepped here before. She never realized how easy it was to disappear.’ We climb inside the white van and come face to face with terror: the serial killer rapist-his family-his victims and the writer who is able to create conflict, action, and resolution in each scene. A story must parade in this order across the well-eaten page. This is exactly what Tuite does-each chapter is its own seamless chilling narrative-and we are there with the speaker riding inside the white van, a witness to evil. ‘Blood on paper is a bad joke, ’ but this collection of fiction and poetry is both remarkable and disturbing. White Van is a book you can’t put down, a book you will forever remember.
-Anne Elezabeth Pluto, author of The Deepest Part of Dark
Tuite’s White Van is a work of startling lucidity. She captures the myriad frightening, familiar figures who stalk lunch counters and verge on small town edges in masterful language. This is an elbow to the mouth, a merciless howl in the face of a world given up on the Disney version of fairytales. Tuite’s characters persist in the reveries of the loner. She knows her beat, this appalling world of solitary pathos. It is a starkly eruptive world of words beyond death, beyond decay.
-Clementine E Burnley, speaker and writer
