Our Imaginary Childhood - Paperback

by Sara Watson (Author)

Our Imaginary Childhood, Sara Watson's vivid new chapbook, takes on the task of narrating childhood through the offbeat, precocious voices of eleven siblings growing up helter-skelter. The mother and father drink and "spend whole days in bed." "They love us, but they have headaches," the unnamed central narrator says, and later adds, "Every family needs a storyteller, otherwise the family is a secret." The slow reveal of this family' secret pries open the brief, compact form of the chapbook. The ending of OUR IMAGINARY CHILDHOOD is worthy of a novella. This is a very poignant and intelligent debut.

-Lynn Emanuel


The magic of Sara Watson's Our Imaginary Childhood collects in coffee cans, dirty spoons, crows' nests, and graveyards. This is a family ghost story where the ghosts are alive, playing house or playing dead in a home filled with love and haunted by alcoholism. But in the mailbox or under a rock or beneath a tree there is always a secret password, a key to the kingdom of hazy orange kid dreams. Each of these prose poems is a tiny wonder.-Rochelle Hurt