This is poet McSweeney's first novel with Fence books and is set in a spaced-out, delimited future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency", and is named for it's quiescent-but-full-of-agency female protagonist.
Flet is an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the oft-invoked Emergency, after which all public spaces are off-limits, is a tool of sociopolitical manipulation, if not oppression: the decentralized citizenry binge on endless, aimless file tape transmissions drained into their homes. A face-off between this tentative muckraker and her icy superior is set to go down at a mandatory, nationwide Reenactment, in advance of which Flet finds herself dreaming and driving endlessly off the map. Will she find the missing cities, or will she lose herself in the flood-tide of images that wash over the Nation?
An elegant entry in the field of speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination and syntax down to the speed of a narrative.
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JOYELLE MCSWEENEY is the author of The Red Bird (winner of the 2002 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize) and The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004) , and of a companion novel to Flet: Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007). She is the founding editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web journal for international writing and hybrid forms. McSweeney is a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Notre Dame and lives in Indiana with her husband and daughter.
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