Over and over Brad Rose delights with his ability to make us stop and see the world in a new way; from his candid observation that King Tut looks like a girl and the real reason we cry at a stranger’s funeral to his elegant explanation of Death ("it's music and it isn't") and an evening with Buddy at the Pink Elephant. Each story in this collection urges you to examine life in celebration, playfulness, and sometimes in mourning.

Comes now Brad Rose with this collection of tiny stories. True: thumb through the book and you’ll see poems and, more expectedly, given what I just wrote, very short pieces of fiction that only occasionally exceed a single paragraph or page. But they are all narratives, complete with a character or two, the necessary conflict, a beginning, middle and end—or, at least, an end that points to a range of possible endings, some warm, and some that remind us that the world can be cold and heartless. Rose’s narratives bring us tiny snapshots of terrible things, funny things, scary things and, fully human things.

Brad Rose's latest collection of spare and powerful monologues combines the emotional immediacy of micro-fiction with the precision of poetry to confront the twists and turns of our distorted psyches. The Pink X-Ray teems with voices in extremis — the homeless veterans, mug shot photographers, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers and their victims who have lived lives "beautiful with mistakes" (not to mention Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein, horseflies and hummingbirds) — filtered, with sardonic humor and unblinking directness, through the referential arsenal of Schrodinger's Cat, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Munch's Scream and Vegas jackpots. If "redemption is the shortest distance between two points" then these gut-punching monologues are sure to help us on our way.

Brad Rose enhances our understanding of life, death, and everything in-between through manic images that challenge conventional perception. His poetry and short shorts remind us that good literature is not only something to read, but also something to experience. "Pink X-Ray" provides the kind of reading experience that rattles the brain and refurbishes the heart.