Anthony Bukoski

University of Wisconsin English professor Bukoski grew up—and still lives—in the Polish community of east-side Superior, Wisconsin. It’s been the setting for several books of short stories that form a kaleidoscopic portrait of Bukoski’s community, like Yoknapatawpha on the Gitchee Gummee. The latest, Time Between Trains, contains thirteen new tales that show Superior the way his people see it. In the title story, a lonely railroad inspector, the only Jewish man in town, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an isolated widow who lives near the tracks. “Closing Time” takes us through a bad night in the career of the well-meaning but overbearing accordion player at the local bar. And Bukoski, a Vietnam veteran, gives us what we can only imagine is a thinly disguised version of himself in younger days, in three stories about a nineteen-year-old corporal named Thaddeus, whom we first meet as he is stumbling drunk around town, unwilling to admit he’s terrified of going to war and poignantly unaware that he’s walking around for one last look at the town he might never see again. Bukoski has a deep well of empathy for his characters and does a nice job drawing out their emotions. If we could change one thing, it’d be his occasional bouts of clonking prose style.
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