Split Series Vol. 3: The Most Dangerous Game & The Romances

Authors: Megan Giddings and Lo Kwa Mei-en

Publisher: The Lettered Streets Press (2016)

Megan Giddings's The Most Dangerous Game is a book of pursuits, failed attempts at remembering the capital of Connecticut, ghosts too depressed to haunt, livers being turned into tomato plants, and a coven that takes their David Bowie fandom too far. 

Lo Kwa Mei-en's The Romances follows Farah Mendlesohn's definition of romance in Rhetorics of Fantasy, which "functions as a metaphor between the mundane and the fantastic , but also renders palatable what is unpalatable when originating from the hostile." Told through gnarled iterations of the sestina, the villanelle, and heroic couplet forms, Mei-en's romances are a narrative tradition, a genre tag, a complex of cultural expectations that accompany the female body, and, of course, a "good," "old-fashioned" love story.