When you're born, you have no expectations. But if you were capable of having expectations, it would be reasonable to assume you would be held by your mother for more than eleven seconds; that after your cord was cut, you'd be wrapped in a blanket and then placed in the arms of your father; that you would see the woman who gave birth to you again sometime after you left that room. Melissa Lynn Gilpatrick gets none of these things. Instead, she's born into a world full of midwestern religious values, a world of pornstars, a world of particle physicists and Broadway playwrights, a world of terrorism and technology and natural disasters. In PARTICLES, Shawn Mihalik, author of Brand-Changing Day and The Flute Player, pulls us gently from our own reality before thrusting us violently into a deep, uncomfortable, and often hilarious exploration of the loneliness of existence and the connections we make as human beings in the first decades of the 21st Century.