Inside every human being lies a unique universe of perception, built of nature and nurture, full of misapprehensions and fears and sometimes wisdom. Even actions and reactions that may look inexplicable from the outside make sense from within the frame of reference of the actor or reactor, and if more of us kept that in mind on a daily basis, the world might arguably be a better place.

Reading A Primitive Heart is a little like becoming an omniscient being for awhile. Noted Broadway playwright and former Stone Ridge resident David Rabe takes us on a wild ride through 21st-century life, swooping down on a succession of folks who are ordinary in their very extraordinariness and the circumstances they face, bringing us within their magic circles so convincingly that we find ourselves seeing the world through their eyes.  It's not always totally comfortable, but it's definitely worth the trip.

We meet a husband questioning his marriage as he and his wife feel their way through the agony of a miscarriage, and are granted a sudden glimpse of his relationship with his own father. A club gal escaping her stifling parents, who's so hard-wired for disaster that we marvel at her survival. A group of guys down on their luck who very nearly commit a murder without ever actually wanting to do so. A man seeking to establish something real and true with his young son in the wake of divorce. A fallen-away Catholic going head to head, intellectually and spiritually, with the priest who mentored him. A man who endured barely imaginable nightmare circumstances after his mother abandoned him, and who now meets her second family, for the first time, at her deathbed.

Like the coked-up Hollywood types in his award-winning play Hurlyburly, the go-go dancers and johns who populate In the Boom Boom Room and the explosive, doomed soldiers in Streamers, the people in David Rabe's tales do not behave especially well. They're edgy and have trouble sleeping. They drink, they smoke, and they might leave you feeling unnerved if you ran into them on the street or in a restaurant. The magical part of Rabe's gift is that we come to understand why, from his characters' own points of view, their thoughts and feelings are entirely logical and even inevitable. We aren't always compelled to root for them—at least I wasn't—but they most certainly become real and thus comprehensible.

The America these people inhabit is an unforgiving land, full of false promises and semi-inexplicable glitches and misunderstanding—an all-too-familiar place to anyone who's ever had even five minutes of depression or suffered some personal crisis and felt temporarily overwhelmed. Rabe's portraits are action shots. His protagonists are captured in motion: coming home, leaving home, discovering that there is no home to go back to, that there never was. The characters they encounter along the way seem just as lost as they are.

Somehow, the end result becomes a powerful endorsement of compassion—of acknowledgment that these moments of confusion and near or actual meltdown can come upon anyone, almost anytime and certainly anywhere. We may not be the ones heading out dressed in Madonna drag or lifting the handgun from a stranger's dresser drawer, but the people who do these things are nowhere near as alien or distant from us as we might prefer to believe.

This is a book that sticks to you. After reading it, I found myself looking at random strangers with new eyes, imagining back stories and circumstances as if I were on some curious hitherto unknown drug—hardly Ecstasy, but certainly Empathy. Given that no such pharmaceutical has yet been crafted, we need to be grateful to writers like Rabe who know how to dole out the dosage.

Have you ever encountered epic Inuit legend, avian bestiality, sibling incest, and several instances of dismemberment, all in a novel's opening chapter? I must admit that I was truly taken aback by the first 30 pages of Lawrence Osgood's Midnight Sun. The broad scope and sheer intensity of Osgood's story made me wonder more than once, Where is he going with this?

I soon found out. As the story began to pick up momentum and to introduce some unique and fascinating characters, I willingly surrendered my disbelief at some of Osgood's wilder turns, and became utterly engrossed in this unusual Arctic tale.

Midnight Sun encompasses a survival chronicle and a character study, a truthful look at modern Inuit culture, and a spiritual coming-of-age. Set in 1982 in the Inuit coastal village of Poniktuk, the story splits and follows along several parallel tracks that eventually come together in a kind of well-orchestrated train wreck. These storylines mainly occur in the modern world, with occasional forays into the realm of the forgotten spirits of the ancient Inuit people. The first section of the book brushes up the reader on Inuit mythology by telling the rather brutal stories of how Sedna, the spirit of the sea, and Aningan, the spirit of the moon, came to be. Both spirits feel forgotten by their people, who have given up their traditional nomadic life for an easier, stationary one.

Despite Poniktuk's isolation, technology has been rearing its enticing head. Christian missionaries have been increasingly present among the village's recent generations, and the townspeople, while still retaining a healthy measure of traditional Inuit values, have nevertheless been acclimating slowly to Western culture. The recurring motif of tradition versus progress appears in diverse forms throughout the novel. Osgood touches upon the many issues that the modern Inuit face, but never stoops to condone, or condemn, their decisions. The spirits, however, are not as forgiving. Furious at being ignored, they begin interfering in the human world, eventually provoking astonishing consequences.

A second storyline follows a white couple on their honeymoon—a several-thousand-mile canoe trip through the Arctic's unpredictable waters, with Poniktuk as their destination. Another follows Nate, a young Inuit man; bored, apathetic, and fresh from dropping out of high school, he finds himself becoming involved in native land-rights programs. Miracles begin to spring up around him when the spirit of the moon gets involved, and a new dynamic, highlighting the sharp contrast between the supernatural and the mundane, begins.

Having spent over a decade in the far north, living and working with the Inuit, Osgood (now living in balmier Germantown) holds a love of the Arctic Circle's land and people that is constantly apparent. His true talent as a writer shines most clearly in his sweeping yet specific descriptions of the flora, fauna, and feeling of the nature of life in northern Canada. "With no wind stirring, the stillness around her was so deep it seemed physical, as if the hills stored silence in them like a mineral." Osgood's beautiful descriptions of the landscape don't hinder the momentum of the story, and add to the richness of his imagery.

Despite my original reservations, I truly came to enjoy this novel. It isn't for everyone—a love of mythology and fantasy certainly helps—but the story also contains rare, true details of a relatively unexplored culture from an obvious expert. Osgood's imaginings of the spirit world, while occasionally approaching the bizarre, become oddly plausible in the reflection of his human characters' reactions to these supernatural events. Imagination, mythology, and a keen instinct for human nature coalesce in Midnight Sun, making it a book that is as educational as it is enjoyable.

Founded four years ago by Brent Robison to showcase new fiction by Hudson Valley writers, the literary journal Prima Materia's latest volume includes poetry and memoir. Its brief and fleeting 32 selections progress like a slide show, projecting images of family, home, landscape, and travel onto the pages. A fertile travelogue emerges overall, though limited space allotted the prose pieces (some excerpted from larger projects) makes the journey read like closely spaced exit signs along a toll road. While Robison's inclusiveness (24 local authors in all) is commendable, one might hope for fewer but more expansive pieces in future issues. Still, Speeding Through the Night achieves a consistent sensibility, with several selections worth mining for their deftness and lyricism.

Much of the collection's poetry could have been lifted from an anthology of verse called Heavy Traffic. Lynn Behrendt turns over the ignition with "God's Little Ticker," revisiting the drunken-driving death of a brother. Tailgating behind, the best poems in the anthology likewise exploit the automotive motif and reflect on filial relations. Marilyn A. Johnson serves up the admirable "Tires Blown Off," and the able Al Desetta "The Bastards" and "A Metaphor in Ten Parts." In "White Slope," Anne Richey uses the conceit of "slippery roads" to chronicle a child watching her father shave his "snow-capped cheeks." Additionally, the final line of "Trailways," her meditation on bus passengers, lends Prima Materia 4 its subtitle.

On foot in "The Boar Hunt," Sigrid Heath cuts a path through the wilds of Guatemala, circa 1946, documenting an expedition undertaken by her parents. Told from the point of view of her mother, Eleanor, a young Air Force officer's wife encumbered in the outpost by her own intelligence and allegiance to high art, it recalls post-colonial themes favored by Somerset Maugham and Paul Theroux. Closer to home, alpinist Werner Hengst guides readers on an unusual trek through the Hudson Highlands in "Crossing the Bridge," his personal account of scaling the Bear Mountain Bridge by walking along its 16-inch-diameter cable—350 feet in the air. And trawling a mall where a shooting had recently taken place, Susan Piperato's story "Glue" captures with candor the colloquial diction of disaffected youths as well as the gestures of tenuous friendship.

A young family goes house hunting in Nancy Graham's "This House Is Talking to You," a fine-spun story starring an aging seller who is deeply invested in the hundred-year-old historic landmark with which he must part. "There were large rooms with wide openings, gilt-edged mirrors over fireplaces of twin parlors, bookcases framed by deep-set windows for nestling on the margin between outside and in," one of the would-be buyers notices. Houses also appear in Wendy Klein's arresting memoir excerpt "Snapshots," composed of brief, interconnected frames that amplify a quarter-century, beginning in 1963. "In a big white house with hidden passageways and too many bedrooms, a black maid serves us scrambled eggs on sunny mornings," Klein writes of childhood, games of hide-and-seek foreshadowing secrets that over time splinter and divide the family.

Most accomplished of all, Mark Morganstern's fully realized and satisfying "Zen Master of the Hudson Valley" trenchantly revels in the regional pastime of seeking intuitive enlightenment. Reminiscent of Jeff Greenwald's Lonely Planet guidebook Shopping for Buddhas, this extended koan turns spot-on satire into virtue. Its narrator-seeker, a freelancer hired to interview "prominent Zen figures," reveals that "the whole project smelled of patchouli oil, and there was gossip that this was a tourism ploy by the Woodstock Town Council to get bodies on the Village Green during the slow season, keep the legend going as it were." Felicitous use of thematic metaphor throughout propels the story, as with: "In the fading light, in even rows, the cabbages reminded me of monks' heads, bowed in evening meditation." The penultimate selection, Morganstern's prose uplifts Prima Materia 4 with final resolve, "joyously, incomprehensibly."