Darlin’ Neal
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, College of Arts and Humanities
UCF Women Faculty Authors Elegant Punk
Darlin’ Neal
2012
Press 53
Darlin’ Neal
2012
Press 53
Just as the title Elegant Punk promises, this is a collection full of contrasts, surprises, and strange revelations. Embedded in the gritty realism, there is poetry of the highest order, and grace is splashed all over the commonplace. High passion, silliness, cosmic shifts, and acute psychological insights are rendered up in Darlin’ Neal’s prose so seamlessly and intensely she makes it look easy. You won’t forget these characters, and there’s not a story here you won’t want to finish after you’ve read its first sentence
Rattlesnakes & The Moon
Darlin’ Neal
2010
Press 53
2010
Press 53
These are haunting stories of people bearing the burdens of ordinary life a lot more completely than most of us ever do. Wives and mothers of inmates, sisters of sisters killed in motorcycle accidents, that wonderful-but-dreary Louisiana swampishness pervasive in these eloquent and exquisitely rendered tales of hardship. These are dark stories lit by headlights and lightning, fluorescent signs and tall highway lights, tough stories so real that they have the scent of the lived-through about them, which is testament to Darlin’ Neal’s extraordinary gift for prose and story
