Russian Lover and Other Stories By Jana Martin Yeti/Verse Chorus Press, 224 pp., $15.95 In the title story from Jana Martin's debut collection, and the first book published by the makers of the revered Yeti zine, a young divorce settles in to compose a letter to her former mother-in-law. Through several drafts, she lets her mind and mood wander from sorry (about hurling serving dishes at the wall at Christmas dinner) to not-quite-over-it (does mom know her son's a cheating, passionless asshole?) to kinda over it (an affair with the half-Jamaican hunk down the hall is good medicine). When it's not slyly funny, she encloses a check to cover the cost of cleaning gravy off of the wallpaper, "Russian Lover" is gutpunchingly painful, written from a place of genuine heartbreak. That story alone is worth the price of admission, but Martin has a few more tricks. One story's arranged like definitions but reads like word association; another is so clipped you can practically hear the clock ticking between each sentence fragment. Most of the protagonists are sharp but snakebitten women: strippers, junkies, a dominatrix-in-training, sufferers of unknown and comical ailments. Precise, succinct language keeps the reader in the moment and unprepared for a subtle evolution into the fantastic. In other words: You buy it long before you know you're being sold something. But not so much because Martin's a sweet talker; with prose so forthright and deliberate it's easy to believe you're in the hands of a straight shooter. That's what makes it so surprising, so captivating, when you suddenly realize she's been pulling a fast one on you. http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2007/06/28/short-stories#Russian_Lover_and_Other_Stories