MONARCH: Stories subverts the reader’ s common perceptions about how love can heal, how loss and suffering can transform, and how every character deserves a second chance. America’ s city scars, sewers, alleyways, and bars are landscape to their wars, as characters heal and transform under wind turbines and on open roads, in golden cornfields and with the wails of Chicago blues. Heroes in this collection are the marginalized, the sufferers, the down-trodden, the misfits, the wanderers, and the wounded, shaped by grief but not defined by their scars.