Jeffrey Perso

press release:A Room of One's Own welcomes Jeffrey Perso, author of Water Bodies!

About Water Bodies: Mosquito-infested, dripping with miasmatic mists, flooded by marshes, creeks and lagoons, death by drowning is not an uncommon occurrence in L, a small, isolated town sunk into the banks of the Upper Mississippi River Basin. But when Doctor John Voltaire returns to the place of his birth to settle the “family estate,” the drownings increase with a suspicious and frightening frequency, and Voltaire soon becomes a prime suspect in the investigation into the mysterious deaths. As mile-long oil trains cross crumbling city streets and railroad trestles, and acts of eco-terrorism further threaten civic safety, Doctor Voltaire utilizes logic, reason, and homeopathic remedies to confront his family, fate, and the intersection where the personal and the planetary collide. Water Bodies chronicles the comic, futile and doomed political and social responses to the inexplicable plague of drownings while simultaneously addressing both a tragic ancestral dynamic and a seemingly inevitable, oncoming environmental catastrophe.

Jeffrey Perso grew up along the banks of the Upper Mississippi River Basin, hunting nightcrawlers and Northern Pike, donating blood to all 53 varieties of mosquitoes native to Wisconsin (he has never been bitten by a bat). An award-winning journalist and university professor, his fiction has appeared in, among other places, Crooked/Shift, Embark, Iconoclast, Kudzu House Quarterly, The Rockhurst Review, and Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal. Water Bodies is his first published novel.