Heat Lightning, Flashes and Flames - Charles David Mitchell

"Wherever I go, I am compelled to look, and see it as a crime scene."

A man makes his way through a world that is less than it should be, contending with modern-day colonizers who pretend to be more than they are. As his narrative flings him from the Sonoran borderlands to an abusive Midwestern childhood and back again, he finds himself on different sides of the law, awed by hardscrabble desert life despite the controlling interests pitting him against it.

Filled with empathy and devoid of sentimentality, the stories and poems in Heat Lightning, Flashes and Flames invite us to think about our place in a system that grinds up people on the margins. Its observations echo as that system forces us to choose between assimilation and resistance -- or to navigate both simultaneously.