Alomar is a visionary writer, extending metaphors every which way. Nothing is dead, nothing is inert — his limpid prose pulses with psychedelic life. Animals and inanimate objects alike are personified ... Alomar’s longer flash fiction is equally powerful, careening between political and moral concerns, and occasionally delving into love and other human considerations ... It takes immense skill to forge work that creates meaning by distilling life to its essences. In the best moments of the collection, including the title story, Alomar illuminates our common humanity, and our refusal, at times, to recognize it.
If Kafka had rewritten Aesop’s fables, the result might have looked like this thought-provoking new collection of literary allegories and aphorisms ... Timely and timeless, The Teeth of the Comb is a masterly collection by an urgent literary voice.
The stories in The Teeth of the Comb vary in length from single sentences to a few pages, and over the course of the book Alomar covers a great deal of subjects with graceful precision ... In Alomar’s world, human behavior seems destructive, even to people, as long as they’re not the ones they’re observing. The change in perspective is what reveals human beings as ridiculous: If it is ridiculous for a comb to be vain, how ridiculous is it for a person? ... The effect is that Alomar’s stories give brief flashes of insight into the magnitude of human evil, like staring directly into the sun for a moment before having to look away ... the hope that exists in these stories exists alongside the cruelty, despair, and foolishness. Their uneasy balance is what gives Alomar’s work its disquieting power.
