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Weaving together violence and beauty—“the beginning of war was also a blossom”—The Traps is a lyric collection that refuses a straight-forward narrative. Rather, each poem uses images to evoke an array of emotions: passion, terror, longing. These compact, yet intricate poems explore “traps” in the word’s many connotations; whether we are in “the narrowest spaces” or “tied to the rafters,” we are tempted, lured, and ambushed.

Heroines in Sondra Spatt Olsen's compelling stories often find themselves in bad situations: a wife with an irresponsible husband, an older woman who wants to leave her younger lover, a suburban housewife who wants sex with her doctor, a teacher who falls in love with her student, a young girl haunted by her mother's judgments, a demanding career woman unsettled by her boyfriend's success, a young woman who finds that her friends, when drunk, are potential murderers. But just as Chekhov gives us pleasure from moments of pain, Olsen illuminates the universal humor and pathos of bad situations.

Olsen brings bright wit, fresh empathy, and a generous dose of psychological insight to themes of abandonment and humiliation—her fiction offers a sort of transcendence from pain. These haunting, unsparing stories are not afraid to confront life's traps and pitfalls, but they do so with a celebration of the courage that rises amid the confusion all of us face.