The voices comprising Joe Fletcher's chapbook "Already It Is Dusk" speak under the fear of death. They are wanderers, renegades, shifty-eyed and quick-minded, brains troubled to near muteness by the blank dumb animal suffering of the worlds they inhabit. And though wounded, weirded-out and often wasted, they move on, must so, through the thickets and spur banks, the bars and mill towns and murmuring forests and chaparral dust, as our guides, the unlucky patron saints of What-Goes-Down. Already It Is Dusk is a theater of leather and mud, a vision of struggle and courage and failure written with lyrical eloquence and a dark matter-of-factness. Onstage, muffled cries arise from beyond the red curtain. A priest slurs through an opening prayer. A robed figure trims the gaslight. And you are suddenly alone.
