The visceral strength of some chapters is what makes others feel comparatively shrimpy. Chapters like “Korea,” “Tackle Football” or “Echo” tell simple anecdotes of boys playing sports, pulling pranks and cooking up lame schemes, and these don’t pull the weight that the heavies do. The strongest chapters are when Sampsell keeps a tight focus on the narrower narrative view, in which family scenes show how sex and sex fantasies go awry. This is much more engaging and taps into a deeper, more universal humanity. Even pieces that are micro in length, like one of the best in the book, “Vibrator,” say so much in five sentences. I quote the whole piece:

     Dad gave me a vibrator once. Sort of oval-shaped. He gave it to me so he could wrap it and give it to Mom as a birthday present. Later, they kept it in a drawer by the bed. Then, shortly after, they slept in separate beds.

While I adored many of Sampsell’s poignant episodes, I felt myself at moments flipping through the pages almost too quickly, sifting for gems through a few weaker strays. Some later, more sexually explicit chapters come as welcome relief. “Cruising,” about Sampsell’s first experience with a prostitute, and “Making the Band,” about his first time at an orgy, offer juicy, mirage-like tidbits in the sometimes bleak, dry desert of his described youth. Single sentences here and there glow too: “Heavy breathing is the same in every language.” So true! Then again, maybe every scene can’t be brilliant. Maybe all this to say that by showing his textual muscle Sampsell becomes his own stiffest competition.

On that same note, Joanna Ruocco’s second book, Man’s Companions, succeeds and suffers with some astonishingly heartfelt and surreal moments versus some flatter, overly cerebral. Each story in this short fiction collection is named for an animal -- real or imagined -- connoting possible pets or at least active relationships between humans and animals. Part of what compelled me to read Man’s Companions was my curiosity about a fellow author who had also pondered “Unicorns.” This story, I happily report, is one of the highlights of the book. In it, an embittered writer ruminates on writer’s block, while processing jealousy of her prolific boyfriend by reducing his success to ‘phallogocentrism.’ “When I am not writing, I feel bad. But when I am writing, I am usually not writing. I feel bad. I sit in front of the computer doing small, surreptitious things to my body. When Dave is writing, his…posture is excellent and his fingers never stop moving across the keyboard…” She arrives at the phallus via noting Dave’s confidence, his efficient practice, and his boarding school education. “Whimsy,” she writes, “is how the phallogocentric artists try to hide the phallus. They hide the phallus right there in the open, with unicorns.” Even in this passage, one notices Ruocco’s peculiar writing style, in which short sentences show logical ideas leading to the next in almost robotic bursts. Then they leap somewhere else completely, recalling Lydia Davis’s grammatical, poetic math.