“With a mix of poetry and prose, Josef Miyasato captivates with moments of surrealism and bursts of raw but beautiful language. ‘After a fight, I climb into my bathtub and look inside my brain. It is mostly gray like an old Chevy coughing up exhaust.’ To those whose hearts, minds, chests, or brains are void of light and life, Miyasato offers meditations and stories on good and evil that explore the filling, fulfilling, and cleansing of the human cavity.”

— Tacey M. Atsitty, author of Rain Scald

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“Miyasato is drawn to the strange places where faith, family, technology, and damage collide. His characters inhabit worlds littered with the cheap and disposable, yet he finds within this debris persistent questions about grace, responsibility, loneliness, and what human beings owe one another. There are echoes of Dostoevsky’s moral urgency, Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque, and Denis Johnson’s damaged seekers, but Miyasato’s combination of working-class American texture, religious consciousness, deadpan surrealism, and tenderness is very much his own. Most promisingly, he understands that strangeness is not an end in itself: the impossible enters his fiction to expose something stubbornly real.” - Theodore Dusty, author of How to Swallow a Lie

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“Miyasato writes about the things the world has learned not to see: the lonely, the misshapen, the addicted, the discarded, the spiritually bewildered, and even the monstrous. His fiction has an unusual moral imagination, suspicious of the categories by which people divide the worthy from the worthless, the sane from the mad, the sacred from the profane. Junk yards, government files, suburban garages, cheap food, animals, scripture, and American violence become part of the same strange metaphysical landscape.

What distinguishes Miyasato is his refusal to sentimentalize the people and creatures to whom he extends his attention. His damaged characters can be ridiculous, cruel, self-deceiving, and dangerous; grace does not require innocence. Again and again, his work asks whether consciousness itself creates an obligation—to recognize suffering, to accept responsibility, to see what has been hidden in plain sight. The result is fiction at once funny, grotesque, spiritually restless, and unexpectedly tender: a literature in which the discarded may be sacred, the civilized may be monstrous, and salvation, when it comes at all, often begins with the simple act of noticing.” - Kurt Hambone, author of Shipwrecks and Fishtales