By Peter Markus
Calamari Press
88 pages, $10

Through layers of hypnotic language, improbable mantras and delicately constructed mythology, Peter Markus is weaving a song. It's a song about fish, fishing, and it's a song about the inescapable mud of riverside poverty. Sad and funny, and concerned, above all, with beauty—it's carried to us through the medium of two brothers. Markus establishes such a close connection between these brothers that they become indistinguishable from one another, acting as a single narrator. These brothers reveal a hidden world in which deity-girls can be made from mud and crawled into like caves, in which walking on water is a skill that can be acquired through practice, and things die "the way that we know that nothing ever really does."

There are a lot of ways to describe Markus' particular use of language, but none of them seems quite right. Repetitive. Obsessive. Hypnotic. A little detached. It's all those things, but with none of their negative connotations. Nuances negate the repetitive; urgency justifies the obsessive; a vital awareness breaks the hypnotic spell. The detachment is there, but it conveys intense emotion: creating an atmosphere, setting up an entire landscape; becoming the atmosphere; becoming the landscape.

Beyond the language is a startling ambiguity of content. Characters often die, but they return, either immediately or later in the book; they commit strange acts of consensual violence, most notably with a hammer, some rusty nails and a telephone pole. The dialogue is elusive, either a smattering of keywords or an insinuation of what's said; often, the way characters react to dialogue makes you wonder if anything was really said at all. Interestingly enough, the most intense dialogue occurs between the father and his two sons, our narrator(s). While these exchanges remain somewhat alien, the alien feels quite familiar: There's awkwardness present—combined with love, respect, fear and obedience—that many sons will relate to.

The Singing Fish is an impressive book, most notably because it cannot be parsed, only read or sung. One story that's many stories, an 88-page epic both simple and complicated, it's as much "imaginative" European fiction as it is realist or naturalist American poetry. After reading this book, you begin to get excited about what else Peter Markus might be capable of. You imagine that it will be like nothing you can imagine.