Under the Dam

In this first collection of short stories from a highly-regarded poet, a girl's body reappears in the ice where she has been buried for 50 years, a businessman watches his soul abandon him as he makes a speech, and a tourist staggers through Athens as it transforms into a vision of hell. Depicting solitary figures drawn against stark, troubling backdrops, these stories probe the theme of isolation by freeze-framing each character's life just at the moment when the past breaks the surface, or when the present—like the dam of the title—collapses under its own weight.