The girls and women breathing through Chinquee s pages grapple with the casual cruelty of lovers, parents, and a soul-shattering culture. Hands may be calloused and hearts broken, but pervading every bracing, beautifully crafted sentence is a quiet, insistent strength. These are women you know (maybe yourself) and Shot Girls is an unsentimental declaration: Here I am. See me. --Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects and Carrying the Body

Kim Chinquee's Shot Girls flings you into the jittery lives of women and menacing men, of women on the brink of disaster or anomic drift, the stink of smoke and drink, of bad or so-so sex wafting all around. Alternating between lapidary flashes and short fictions that read like novels, Shot Girls is a sledgehammer strike against patriarchy. Chinquee s deftly drawn dreamers and schemers, drifters and grifters, and gone nuclear families are living, loving, and lying in American pre-fab, its sordid bars and motels, empty parking lots, imposing offices, cold hospitals, and strangling military strongholds. Keenly observed and deeply affecting, Shot Girls is a marvelous haunting, its author a master of loneliness, beauty, desire, sadness, loss. --John Madera, The Big Other