‘Love Sonfs for the Quarantined’:ISU professor crafts believable characters

K.L. Cook crafts stories populated by characters who seem wholly real. Each story in Cook's award-winning 2011 collection, 'Love Songs for the Quarantined” (Willow Springs Editions, 168 pages), introduces the reader to a new person who is eager to share his or her most intimate thoughts about love and pain and loss.

Cook, who teaches in Iowa State University's Creative Writing and the Environment MFA program, presents young men coming of age in ways both positive and negative, men and women trying - with varying degrees of success - to do right by their families, people trying to escape their past or their present or their future, and more. Each glimpse into these lives is searing.

There's humor to be found in stories like 'The Couple Upstairs” and 'What They Didn't Tell You About the Vasectomy” (the latter is the funniest thing I've read in quite some time), but even these tales turn on moments of honest, often painful, emotion. And Cook can devastate in just a few paragraphs as he does in stories like 'When Our Son Died of Leukemia” and 'Blind.”

The collection closes with 'Relative Peace,” a beautiful and sad tale of troubled brothers and the women who struggle to love them. The story unfolds slowly, with layers of various relationships peeled back until we can see the rawest places in these men's lives - a rawness mirrored in the scarred flesh of the narrator who has been severely burned. 'Relative Peace” brings an exceptional collection to a fittingly moving close.