Camille Guthrie
The Master Thief
ISBN 1-930068-05-0
$10.00

The Master Thief is an epic poem which takes coming-of-age stories as its heroic subject matter. Each of its twelve chapters introduces a character who engages with familiar hand-me-down narratives in an adventure of self-invention and linguistic transformation. The characters--including a child, ayoung hero, an animal, a ghost, a servant, and a thief--confront all the dangers entailed in endeavors of mastery and heroism. This bold assembly of tradition and experiment, whose parts have been irreverently stolen from literary history, is stitched together by an unreliable narrator to form a curious, playful, unpredictable whole. In the forest between the real and the imagined, the enactments of youth and the experiences of reading, we encounter the master thief's "barefoot vision."


"Camille Guthrie's The Master Thief is a work of intricate architecture, allusive and elusive, as if one had been invited to a masked party in a remote gothic library, where the music is dissonant and the games as scary as a nightmare before a final exam. 'I lay down on a bed of glass / Small hand mirrors examined my lunar profile / When the giant imprinted its spine into my palm.' Like a modern Psyche, the heroine is tested. Her epic trials are turned by Guthrie into a compelling and ingenious vision."

--Ann Lauterbach


"In The Master Thief, both the girl characters and the landscape of patchwork literary devices they live in fail in the attempted reconstruction of a master narrative, despite which fact the awkward misconduct and occasional dismemberment of Guthrie's hoyden heroines coheres by virtue of their author's exquisite ear for original poetic sounds and deftness at perceptive allusion. The tone is both earnest and whimsical, the content both violent and pretty, the references both strange and familiar. I have never read anything quite like it."

--Jennifer Moxley