“Clear surfaces have found me in every object appearing before me," writes the narrator of Kevin McIlvoy’s new book. These surfaces have urged him for decades to look and listen with penetrating attention to objects, animals, plants, and people. Is It So? is a series of short-short fictions in which the narrator treats the surfaces as signs or glyphs and explores the layers of meaning that lie within, behind, or through the surface. These pieces not only combine narrative prose with the condensed language of poetry, but “playfully mash[ing] up literary genres with visual art and music,” as Christine Hale writes in the book’s introduction.

A surface in this book may reveal layers as literally as a plastic bag shows goldfish inside or an over-painted canvas by Chaim Soutine hides the painting underneath. Another surface may be as complex as an heirloom, a royal blue robe of smelly cloth, a ”blue-rat outfit,” a sign that points to ancestral traditions and family conflicts.

Mclvoy’s honing of sensory perception also drives his earlier novel, At the Gate of All Wonder, where an elderly seer takes children on a “Sonic Adventure Program,” teaching them to look and listen deeply to sounds of a forest. This drive to perceive and explore propelled McIlvoy’s art right up to his sudden death in September 2022. This book is not for those who want answers, solutions or advice. As the narrator says in “Mr. Noom,” engaged readers of his work still ask, ”What Is It?” But curious readers can revel in McIlvoy’s new perspectives. His inquiries range from hilarious to sardonic, from confessional to morally confrontational.

McIlvoy’s use of language as a tool of exploration is reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s “line of words," which serves as . . . “a miner’s pick. . .You wield it, and it digs a path you follow.” Yet McIlvoy attributes further powers to language. “Language summons for us what has been and what is coming. . .Language subjectively creates what it names: like hope.” At the same time, language for McIlvoy is “a spacious prison to which I have committed my life.”

In “A Difficulty” the speaker attempts to draw the goldfish he sees through the plastic bag.  “I get them,” he says. “I can be them ...  .” What does it mean to “be” a goldfish? Writers often “become” their creations, adopting the characters’ voice and movement patterns, their diction and dress, to bring the characters to life on the page. This imaginative empathy allows McIlvoy's speaker to see the goldfish as “middle-aged, muddled;” to draw and become the drapery in a painting; and to speak in the voice of a dog, Yew, who silently commands the speaker: “Don’t nervously blubber-laugh and hold your hand above me in some kind of air-pet.”

McIlvoy’s work challenges boundaries between human and animal, between self and other, and between author and narrator of the work. Only at the end of “Mollycrawlbottom" does the speaker refer to himself as “the author,” but clearly author and narrator approach each other at various other points. As Ms. Hale points out, these autobiographical references are always disguised by “veiling, distortion, and transposition.”

Two ticks traverse the narrator’s body in "Hold. Still.” He reports the ticks’ progress with the immediacy of second person. “[They]sprinted up your thigh, and toured your soft parts,” and then enters the ticks’ minds: “They forgot your body’s acclimating camps and difficult marshes and eerie paths of you.” The distant, commanding voice of the title, “Hold. Still,” returns, satirizing the “we” of medical-ese: “You need our limited and vast expertise.” The speaker who earlier became a goldfish is now an object to be held at arm’s length.

Such sudden shifting points of view are certainly not new. Damon Galgut in The Promise goes from “he” to “I” in one short paragraph so that we see the character from inside and outside at once, and a myriad of other writers use a narrative eye that moves in closer and out again without the grammatical shift from “I” to “you” to “he/she/they.” McIlvoy’s “you” can be the narrator himself, as above, but can also suddenly implicate the reader.You may find yourself on his pages.

Observation, emotion, imagination and advocacy  come together in the multi-layered satire, “Mollycrawlbottom.” The speaker tries to persuade the Chief of a “hospice aquarium” to accept this ancient wormy creature. First the speaker rants about rejection, then he gives up on the Chief and returns to the sensory feast of a walk in the woods. After a tour de force tribute to saplings, nests, fruits and seeds, which skates on the icy surface of anger, he writes to the Chief, in words many writers will recognize, "that the wonders of nature are “all too complicated for a sufficient number of readers to relate to'" and signs it “Respectfully, The Author.”

In the 20-teens I applied to a novel workshop with McIlvoy and talked briefly with him on the phone. “What’s this about dance?” he asked, a smile in his voice, apparently having seen that I had been a dancer/choreographer before I started writing. He had just discovered the joy of dancing with his wife, an unexpected way of perceiving the self and the world. In "Poise," the surface is a ballroom dance class, written in the imperative with the voice of a teacher, who tells the narrator to see a window over his partner’s right shoulder. “Have you ever seen this view before?” Now the kinesthetic sense, the senses of movement and position of the body, join the other five in the poet’s array of senses.

McIlvoy told us at the time of the workshop that he was moving toward Buddhism, but I did not know until I read this book that he was raised Catholic. I am a convert to Catholicism myself with an ever-broadening sense of this tradition and a desire to bring it to life. Thus I was delighted by “In the Garden,” which retells the New Testament story of the Last Judgement, Matthew 25. In the original, readers can decide whether they are those who help the needy or those who don't—sheep or goats in the parable. The first-person narrator of “In the Garden” is quite familiar with a present-day Jesus who speaks in the vernacular and is up-to-date on photos and phones. This Jesus “is walking in my neighborhood like he always does” and asks for a ride, then a sandwich, then a drink of water. The speaker “doesn’t have a car right now,” then is “not a sandwich man,” aligning himself clearly with the goats who face damnation. We, the readers, are left to realize that we might do/have done/will do, the same.

The poet Sebastian Mathews in his essay, “Listen! Listen!—The poetic genius of Kevin McIlvoy” . . . claims that “McIlvoy wrote straight-up realism . . . that captured the lunacy of being human.” I agree, not that he writes in that literary tradition, depicting everyday activities as they are, but that he searches these events for the real meanings they can conceal or reveal. In "Mr. Noom," a piece that relates more directly to the author than most of these pieces, McIlvoy's speaker says of himself as teacher and writer, “I offered despairing and ecstatic madness.”

McIlvoy’s use of parables and flights of imagination in no way contradicts Matthews’ assessment. Whether laugh-out-loud funny, satiric or celebratory, all these pieces lead to an ever-deepening discovery of the real concealed by illusory surfaces. Is It So? offers surprises at every turn and rewards reading over and over.