A Review of Trailer Park Ocean by Josh Price
Written by Nicole Kowalewski
Josh Price’s Trailer Park Ocean is less a collection of flash fiction than snapshots of a man’s life, a novel distilled into its most potent vignettes.
The book follows a man trapped by the aftereffects of a tumultuous childhood, never quite able to claw free of his parents’ desperation and pain. It is a tale of addiction and abuse spilling from one unlucky generation to the next. From the first story, grief is punctuated by strangely poignant detail. The jagged edge of bitter remembrance is a recurring theme. After all, as Price’s narrator muses,
“When life breaks, you have to smash the bits back together to have something whole.”
As this line suggests, our protagonist stumbles through what more optimistic narratives might have called a redemption arc, finding rare bits of beauty—a kind friend, an attempt at committed romance—that inevitably fall apart, whether by fault or the same terrible fortune that denoted his start in the world.
Price’s writing is a gem, equal parts visceral and moving. It is filled with the sort of bittersweet revelations that drunken midnight reveries and angry reminiscences tend to bring. After the aftermath of a fateful childhood car accident, our narrator idly muses,
“The silence we shared was a place where stars formed me, not old enough to understand, Mom not old enough to give up. She tried to cover her face with makeup, but one eye looked too big–her cheekbone splashed with a deep web of scars. If she asked me, I always told her she looked pretty.”
Poetic bits in the prose hint at a depth beyond simple suffering. You will witness flashes of compassion rooting out the humanity at the center of these short stories.
In less than thirty pages, this collection is short and anything but sweet; its narrative is rough-edged and grim, its pages painted with suffering. It is Price's writing that allows space for levity. Despite the heavy subject matter, Trailer Park Ocean is compulsively readable; one can't help but keep turning pages, engrossed in the story of one man's grudging though beautiful survival in an unwelcoming world.
Trailer Park Ocean
Published by Thirty West Publishing House
34 pgs
Paperback | August 2024 | $11.99
Nicole Kowalewski is currently earning her BFA in Creative Writing at Roger Williams University, which houses the Mount Hope literary magazine where she's served as an assistant editor and copyeditor since 2022. She is also a three-time participant in the RWU Bermont Fellowship in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. She loves experimental storytelling, good theatre, and a passionate debate. Nicole was a summer 2024 intern for Thirty West.
This sounds right up my reading alley - I love the short and to the point review!