Readers familiar with local author Gina Ochsner’s short stories have likely been looking forward to the arrival of her first novel, "The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight," due out Feb. 8. The title is an immediate example of what makes Ochsner such a powerful artist. Her ability to lace words together in ways that are new, creating peculiar clarity, is formidable. That ability is the strongest and most pleasurable feature of her new novel.

The story is set in Russia, in a non-specific time before the fall of the USSR. It is about the residents of a condemned apartment building, and the strange humor to be found in their equally condemned lives. Many of them have a small stake in a local museum, whose famous exhibits are all fake, made from discarded candy and torn paper bags. When news comes that a foundation called Americans of Russian Extraction for the Causes of Beautification is coming to bestow a donation on a worthy Russian museum, residents must work together to prove their museum worthy of the prize. In between that are love triangles, tortured histories, suicide, homeless children, a ghost and a goat.

That description may be the hook, but truly, it’s not really what the book is about. It’s only the clothesline on which more important topics are pinned. The book is about how different people handle suffering. What hope looks like. It’s about history, cruelty and love. The book uses unusual people in an unusual situation to field an intricate study of humanity.

One of the most delightful things about reading Ochsner is that she doesn’t seem to believe that boring people exist. The fattest, oldest, dullest woman is concealing of maze of drama and peculiarities. To convince us of this Ochsner introduces her characters' quirks first. The grieving widow brings her goat to the funeral. She spends her days guarding her port-a-potty and checking a nearby snow bank to make sure her husband’s corpse is still safely preserved. Her son uses the same shoe polish to blacken both his hair and his cracked leather jacket. There is more to each character, and logic to their eccentricities. Ochsner wants you to be intrigued enough to discover the details, maybe because she knows it will require a bit of patience.

This book is poetry. People who enjoy reading poetry are not hurried. They re-read line after line, listening to the rhythm and enjoying the bend and curve of the language. These are the people Ochsner writes for. The people for whom she turns a description of water into a song, as in, “The water turned light viscous and noise unraveled in muted threads, as if from the edges of a dream.”

Her story is tangled in beautiful language, evocations and sensuous memories. The plot is there, but it isn't the most significant part. One chapter pulls it forward, the next lets it dangle a bit while more essential things are explored. If there was even a drop of self-indulgence or arrogance in Ochsner’s writing, this would not work. But Ochsner is an earnest, gentle and funny writer. In her hands the dalliances are warm and valuable, and they are infinitely more important than just getting to the end of the book.