Black Arts & Culture Feature:
Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
18 Shticks
By Margarita Meklina
Propeller
March 2025
Margarita Meklina’s genre-defying book, 18 Shticks, is a surreal and beautifully-written series of 18 short pieces that sit somewhere between vignette, fiction, poetry and memoir. Three of the pieces are translated from the Russian and all of the work in this collection displays a linguistic deftness that traverses language boundaries, moving across time and space – from Moscow to Dublin, Norway to the USA, with the weary-wise perspective of perpetual migrant and traveller. Right from the start a sense of the uncanny pervades the work with an almost Borgesian quality that combines the everyday with the fantastical. In the brief story that opens the book, “The Cure”, a sick pianist raises money for a much needed operation and her partner spends it on a Bösendorfer grand, “her childhood dream.” The resulting “cure” is mystical and poetic, human and machine becoming as one:
She opened the lid and lay on vibrating strings as in a surgical theatre, tender thumps of hammers making her feel in good hands.
The book is lightened with pen and ink drawings throughout, creating a whimsical feel. Many of the pieces connect, creating a scaffold through the book that, taken as a whole, feels like memoir. These pieces explore the trajectory of a failed marriage, bad relationships, addiction, parenthood, and grief, but also desire and pleasure. Just as Meklina blurs the boundaries between memoir and fiction, so too does she blur boundaries between life and death, love and hate, male and female, and even between human and the non-human – animals, bodies of water, and even inanimate objects. People are shapeshifters and they move in and out of a natural and unnatural landscape becoming dophins, fish or dolls in ways that are entangled with longing, emotions providing the catalyst for a transformation:
Weird from his very childhood, he liked to be a doll and wanted to return to the empty puppeteer’s house.” “How do you know about it?” I asked. He didn’t answer and went away. Only at that moment did I notice the strange, slow, mechanical-like movements of his arms and a constrained and awkward mechanical gait. (“Chairs and Dolls”)
Many of the stories in 18 Shticks explore power dynamics. These dynamics play out in a variety of ways, changing throughout the work shifting between wealthy and poor, male and female, sexual partners, married couples, illicit lovers, and most poignantly, the relationship between a mother and her daughter who have been separated by the impact of divorce:
At home, when Dad talks about Mom, he starts referring to her just as “the person.” “That person,” he cringes. “That person again called me and asked how you are! She disturbed my workday so I couldn’t work after being so upset.” (“Fiona’s Fish”)
These dynamics change in surprising ways through the work, each piece’s denouement providing a twist that is sometimes sad and poignant and sometimes wry, as in the powerful long poem that ends the collection “Dolphin in the Dead Sea”:
I’d like to be that adorable Russian beluga,
always so cheerful,
smiling,
a whale with a harness with GoPro connected to her,
following dolphin13@yahoo.com forever,
premonitioning everything that happens to her,
being a cyclops camera on the highly sensitive stick,
always watching over her (“Equipment of St. Petersburg”).
At forty-five pages, 18 Shticks isn’t a long collection, but it covers a lot of ground. Individually these are stories of ordinary lives made surreal through life’s twists, through close examination, and through a sense that just beneath the surface of any situation, there is another reality simmering. Taken collectively, the work comes together in surprising ways, creating a multi-faceted montage of life. 18 Shticks is highly original, fun and fast to read but also deeply moving, sad and rich.
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