I left Memphis for Olympia, Washington, on the Amtrak with $200 tucked inside a copy of The Journal of Albion Moonlight. I had never heard of Kenneth Patchen. The bold, abstract cover designed by the groundbreaking New Directions designer Alvin Lustig caught my eye. But it was the title that truly captivated me: The Journal of Albion Moonlight. The way the words roll off the tongue, the way it strikes a vision—unique to each reader.
Outside the window, the rusted skeletons of the industrial Midwest gave way to the seemingly endless plains of Middle America before rising into the majestic, snow-covered mountain peaks that touched the Pacific Northwest’s vast, colorless sky. I hardly noticed. I was engrossed in The Journal of Albion Moonlight. The book was a dream, the prose abstract and ephemeral, with bold writing in the margins and sections written in Patchen’s own handwriting. The form rebelled against all the literary rules I thought I understood. I gave copies to my friends. Most of them hated it, which only strengthened my kinship with the book, as if it were written for a chosen few, and I was one of them.
Years later, while in college in Olympia, all the creative writing professors despised conventional narratives—plot, character development, conflict, climax, resolution. Instead, I was introduced to poetics, liminal spaces, metafiction, and the daring experiments of the high modernists, the postmodernists, and the OULIPO group. I craved the intersection of form and content, books that were as much critique as “story.”
It is from this literary lineage that Alan Michael Parker’s Bingo, Bango, Boingo emerges.
Bingo, Bango, Boingo is both a collection of short stories and a Bingo game, representing a prism of literary possibility. It comprises a series of brief pieces interspersed with literary Bingo cards—each square filled (or empty) with a word, line, or phrase that invites you to linger until something clicks. BINGO!
The short pieces are unconventional, though some take on a more recognizable form than others. “In Defense of Solitude,” a piece simply titled “=,” and a few others read like prose poems: “If I were the separate thing that is a tree, and still belong … If I were the music I would sneak through the drapes into people’s lives, happy.,” and “Chatting = remembering = saving.”
Other pieces, such as “Unemployment Benefits,” a story about getting fired from shitty jobs and the concept of regret, or “Ireni and the Ghost,” a meditation on death, loss, and the ghosts left behind to fill the void, read like vignettes with the tip of the iceberg just visible enough to know there’s a world beneath the surface that you can’t see, and really don’t need to see to grasp the point. And then there’s “Speculative Fiction,” a Barthian meditation on how a story reveals itself as a constrained structure that can only allude to a Platonic shadow of True meaning.
The Bingo cards consist of, well, Bingo cards: a 5×5 grid with titles like “People Floating Away Bingo,” “Car Crash Bingo,” “Don’t Hate Your Daddy Bingo.” Each square is either blank or filled with a word, a phrase, or a meditation. “Does everyone’s twenties ruin their forties?” “They’ll know,” “Wrong century,” “Aunt Sarah’s outlived three husbands.” Each Bingo square serves as its own thought starter. The Bingo cards can be read horizontally, diagonally, in no particular order, or wherever your eyes or fingers take you.
I’d be remiss to start this essay praising book covers without mentioning the art. The cover of Bingo, Bango, Boingo was designed by Matthew Revert, a prolific artist, writer, musician, and overall creative. Revert has designed covers for the likes of Elle Nash, Blake Butler, Jeff VanderMeer, and over 600 others for various small presses, including Dzanc Books, Clash Books, Maudlin House, and many more. His work blends a distinctive digital and organic collage style that evokes a subtle critique of nostalgia and the book cover itself. You can’t judge a book by its cover until you can. When you see Revert’s work on the cover, it’s usually a book worth picking up.
But back to Bingo, Bango, Boingo. Despite its formal play, the book avoids cold, clever gimmicks. It’s less an avant-garde critique of the literary establishment than a literary playdate where you’re invited to join the author in filling in the blanks, taking leaps of imagination, and becoming an interactive agent of meaning-making. For lovers of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Christian Bok’s Eunoia, Lydia Davis’ shattered fragments of life, and frankly, for anyone who has ever found themselves on a train—real or metaphorical—watching the passing landscape through a window, yearning for something experimental yet real, confusing yet illuminating.
The book is playful and strange, as clever as it is human, with an emotional resonance that transcends the boundaries of our subjectivities and sheds light on the fragments—fragments that can be pulled apart and put back together, read sideways, up, down, and out of order. Pieces of disparate meaning woven together to form some recognizable narrative in the best way we know how, only to create new fragments—which are really all we have to work with anyway.
Bingo, Bango, Boingo, by Alan Michael Parker. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc Books, February 2025. 140 pages. $16.95, paper.
Grant Gerald Miller is a writer, freelance portrait, and headshot photographer, and manuscript consultant from Memphis, Tennessee. His fiction and poetry have appeared in HAD, Maudlin House, Sonora Review, and others. He can be reached at grantgeraldmiller@gmail.com.
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 