cover image Crowning the Queen of Love

Crowning the Queen of Love

Susan Welch. Coffee House Press, $13.95 (200pp) ISBN 978-1-56689-058-8

Some unusual metaphors for situations of love--bugs and busses--reappear in this debut collection by Pushcart Prize winner Welch. In ""Queen,"" Adrian, a 40-ish former prostitute, returns home to visit her sister and father, an exterminator who once had a promising career as an entomologist. Adrian, ""the verdant, swelling, sexual queen,"" and the only one to leave home, is seen in contrast to the mere drones who inhabit ""the bug house."" ""Stalking Angel Dewayne"" portrays the obsessional love of Glenna Swenson, a college writing teacher, ""the queen of late night extension classes,"" whose deceased husband, an entomologist, hunter and taxidermist, was once her teacher. Glenna stalks her target, Spence Earl Dewayne, with the same gusto with which her husband once gathered his prey. Bus trips provide Welch's characters with the vehicle to explore their complicated feelings. ""Broken Music"" brings Victoria, an American tax attorney, on a bus trip to Auschwitz with her mother, Fania, a survivor of that death camp. In another bus story, ""Darcy,"" a bawdy woman in a wheelchair irritates, entertains and cons some of her fellow passengers, demonstrating Welch's facility for creating pitch-perfect voices. The author is at her best when she sticks to the plainspoken but vivid language that shows her strengths, depicting women in not quite everyday situations who seek both love and awareness. This is an energetic and remarkably consistent collection: no amazing standouts, but no clunkers either. (Apr.)