Poison

POISON is a collection of loosely interrelated short stories chronicling one family’s struggles with drugs, alcohol, poverty, gang affiliation, death, disease, and depravity in Los Angeles, California. Most of the stories are set in the 1990s, and channel the trends of the decade, especially those specific to LA. The chronology of the collection is scattered, the dates and details inconsistent or conflicting. POISON aims to emphasize the imperfect nature of memory, the ways in which recollection at once dictates our lives as well as dismantles it. The collection is accompanied by a fictional family tree and a nonfictional photo album containing real photographs of the semi-fictionalized characters depicted throughout the stories. While the photos may display a sense of contentment, when coupled with the collection’s content, the reader may begin to interrogate the ways in which memory severely skews reality