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- Icons By Maria Maldonado
By David Allan Cates
Bangtail Press, 2014, 350 pages, $19.75
David Cates’ fifth novel offers a physician protagonist whose husband died six months earlier. She has walked off her job at a hospital emergency room and left her family’s Wisconsin farm and driven across the plains to a friend’s cabin on the Sun River. She’s filled with “a dry emptiness,” but she also has letters from an old lover, Tom Connor, who writes from war in Central America. Her story in the present is informed by his from the past, and they’re both set against a bear who noses around the cabin. Cates earned his M.F.A. degree in creative writing at UM.