At a time when "unemployment line" has the ring of a phrase from a long-ago world, and a tall decaf cappuccino is considered by many to be a staple without which life is not worth living, Therese Svoboda has scrabbled about in the dirt on the outskirts of mainstream America and sculpted 15 memorable representations of the souls who inhabit those places.

Therese Svoboda is the author of a novel and three books of poetry. In this collection of short stories, every word feels as if it has been measured for its weight, and every line tested for rhythm. The stories begin like kaleidoscopes, mishmashes of details that set the reader off-balance until he or she slowly wades through one paragraph after another, paying close attention, and the grains begin to meld into a recognizable, and disconcerting, shape.

"Electricity" begins with a flash in the sky and a man's fall from a grain bin, two startling three-dimensional images that flatten out into an exchange of words that reveal, in an understated manner, a complex, disturbing life story. The man is taken to the hospital by volunteer ambulance workers, whom he managed to call after his accident. We expect to see next a scene that involves the concerned family and the man's struggle for rehabilitation, but Svoboda steps in here and raps our hands gently, drawing our attention to a reality we'd rather avoid. The man's mother and father are informed of the accident. "But the parents have their lives: he is almost forty. And it isn't as if this is his first accident, no, it is a Wolf he has cried too often. All those seizure problems --- this time it is just electricity."

"A Mama" affords us a grim glimpse into the daily routine of a social worker whose job is to pry children away from their clinging, abusive parents each morning, then return them to the violent homes at night. The social worker's conscious, studied detachment is contrasted with the thoughts of a young mothe r brooding over her baby ("it"): "You are given children when they are too small, but if you wait, your chance is up for experiment. For now, it fits good inside the car seat on the table and says nothing if I leave the room, even when I put on salt. This disappoints me. Salt should get a noise out of it."

In the title story, Svoboda takes us even lower in the social strata, to a woman who by mainstream society's definition is scraping the bottom of the barrel. The character heats cat food for dinner and greedily licks ketchup off of a paper plate she reuses day after day, until it is stiff with saliva and food remains. She lives in a trailer court in the rural Midwest, and life in that tiny world is witnessed through her veering, arbitrary narrative focus. She spends her days desperately trying to catch a young girl that she claims lives in a nearby field. In this world, reality becomes whatever its inhabitants manage to make of it. Nearly catatonic from heartbreak, drugs, and the dreary landscape, Svoboda's main character often loses her bearings, such as when "a baby cries behind me and sometimes any baby can be anyone's and I turn to fetch it, forgetting."

Svoboda dazzles her readers with colors, calls, and gestures in scenes that we don't immediately understand. But each time, without fail, she is true to her poetic calling and wipes away the initial cloudiness of the story's slate, revealing disturbing truths whose images will insinuate themselves during our real lives --- as we order a cappuccino at a coffee shop or step into our orderly, secure homes at night. Her creations will never rest quietly in our minds, but will remind us of the breadth of the world and the smallness of the piece that each of us samples from it.