[{"id":17586,"date":"2026-09-02T09:06:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/?p=17586"},"modified":"2026-09-02T12:28:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T16:28:58","slug":"from-udo-kier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/from-udo-kier\/","title":{"rendered":"From UDO KIER"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"16619\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/mammal-pit\/1-dot_website-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" 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https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-Dot_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">55.<br>Totally shilled out for the electric<br>slide. Ultraviolet in my utile hatred.<br>Along the garden, the grapes cool<br>their obsidian bells. All empirical evidence<br>edifies our call to instantaneous insurrection.<br>Pigs are beautiful until they\u2019re people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">56.<br>Child actors: Where are they now?<br>And why aren\u2019t they dead? Natural<br>disasters roll out confirmation of what<br>you already suspect: that you\u2019re a<br>loser, your father was a loser,<br>and your father\u2019s father was Reagan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">57.<br>Please shut the fuck up, angel.<br>No one asked for the etymology.<br>Necromancy should be evil. Pretty please<br>put the intelligentsia on manure duty.<br>Factoids spike my cortisol. Kids\u2019 table<br>politics only from here on out.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">58.<br>One eye trained on the exit,<br>a circle describes the corpse flower,<br>a mariner intones one grimy dirge.<br>I\u2019m not totally opposed to commerce,<br>but every time you don\u2019t buy<br>something is a portal to infinity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">59.<br>Backgammon or Seedbed? Your oyster now,<br>babe. The witness played a Sapphic<br>harp. My fontanelle never fully healed\u2013\u2013<br>hence, my pockets full of bergamot.<br>Who brews the coffee on this<br>bird? Whose choler did I drink?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">60.<br>I bathe my shells in information,<br>strung pearls of the Balkan mentality<br>ripping stitches in my sore throat.<br>The Branch Davidians deserved to live,<br>curling ammunitions on the short breath.<br>The scabbard seals itself for thee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">61.<br>The proof is in the porcine.<br>They called him many names: Zeus,<br>Sweet Marie, Mr. Ed. A tarantula<br>weaving its silken commissary. We abrogate<br>our marriage in time for Fleet<br>Week. Morning light shutters the Danceteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">62.<br>While a prehistoric lake reemerges, my<br>best friend plays with my hair.<br>I didn\u2019t understand love was real,<br>that kind people write evil poems.<br>I offered my captor a half-drunk<br>Gatorade in a nearly Buddhist gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">63.<br>What makes something do something? Vedic<br>refusal of earthly excess. Sufferings per<br>capita. My coquettish little hat blows<br>away in the monsoon. Rebuild Atlantis<br>out of bitcoin or slash every<br>officer\u2019s tires. The blues are over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br>64.<br>Celtics take game fourteen. Beautiful<br>night for a kiss in lower<br>Cleveland. Grey snow. Boston fuck-ups. Landmines.<br>Dirt cup, hold the gummy worm.<br>Limp kimpira salad. Be be aggressive.<br>But that\u2019s just my experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">65.<br>The hilt of my love falls<br>daggerfully for the final time. Swans<br>on ice slip out of syntax.<br>My webbing grows rougher with every<br>wake. Behold the neck where my<br>head once ruled\u2013\u2013my leopard\u2019s whim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:50px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">66.<br>Got too drunk at the funeral.<br>Got Mylar in the balsa wood.<br>Got muted by the Lydian tyrant<br>Croesus. His apology was both tedious<br>and humbling, and in the end<br>I understood. The most abstract wins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t understand love was real,<br \/>\nthat kind people write evil poems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":16619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1367],"tags":[3390,3389,1406,3388],"class_list":["post-17586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fictionpoetry","tag-courtney-bush","tag-eric-tyler-benick","tag-poetry","tag-udo-kier","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- 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of the Rose: On Jake Rose\u2019s &#8220;JOAN&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17569\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/on-jake-roses-joan\/rose_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Rose_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Cover of &quot;JOAN&quot; by Jake Rose\" class=\"wp-image-17569\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=500%2C625&amp;ssl=1 500w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17569\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/on-jake-roses-joan\/rose_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Rose_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Cover of &quot;JOAN&quot; by Jake Rose\" class=\"wp-image-17569\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=500%2C625&amp;ssl=1 500w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Rose_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Jake Rose |<\/strong> <em>JOAN<\/em> <strong>| University of Chicago Phoenix Poets | March 2026 | 96 pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are many Joans of Arc. Mark Twain wrote a two-part novel called <em>Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc<\/em>. Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, and white suffragettes were obsessed with her. Leonard Cohen, Tchaikovsky, and Little Mix have made music about Joan of Arc. Leslie Feinberg wrote that Joan was \u201cthe only person associated with cross-dressing in history I had grown up hearing about.\u201d Then there\u2019s the version of Joan for whom Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right party National Rally marches every May Day, and The Joan of Arc I learned about from <em>Bill and Ted\u2019s Excellent Adventure<\/em>. A new Joan has entered the pantheon this year: Jake Rose\u2019s beautifully textured debut collection <em>JOAN<\/em> offers readers a new perspective on Joan and her interiority.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Divided into four sections\u2014\u201cDomr\u00e9my,\u201d \u201cVaucouleurs to Orl\u00e9ans,\u201d \u201cReims to Compi\u00e8gne,\u201d and \u201cRouen\u201d\u2014the collection charts the last years of the titular Joan\u2019s life. I don\u2019t mean to imply that these poems are narrative. Looping and reflexive, <em>JOAN<\/em> scaffolds explorations of sorrow, queerness, and self-reflection from Rose\u2019s speaker\u2014a shapeshifting Joan rather than <em>the<\/em> Joan. The poems are breathless and unpunctuated, roving over landscapes, as Joan receives \u201cgodliness,\u201d is questioned by an inquisitor, observes the bloodstains on shirts, and the marks and complexities of the self.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this review, I will use she\/her pronouns for Joan, but the book\u2019s speaker has a flexible relationship to gender. Joan moves through both masculine and feminine registers. As I read, I was more interested in Joan\u2019s position as a political subject, an aspiring knight who wanted to fight for her king and in so doing chafed against the strict patriarchal structures of the time. Gender inflects one\u2019s political subjecthood. I was curious about the ways Rose\u2019s Joan approached the unstable nation of France in the fifteenth century.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cDomr\u00e9my,\u201d the first and shortest section in the book, ends with the lines \u201cI\u2019m not a brat but look \/ at the pitiful state of France.\u201d Those lines transported me not to fifteenth-century France but to the very online summer of 2024 when Charli XCX tweeted \u201ckamala IS brat.\u201d Rose\u2019s two lines anachronistically and humorously drew my attention to Joan\u2019s relationship to her national identity. The lines suggest the outline of a binary conflict: brattishness versus a pitiful state. The word \u201cbrat\u201d implies youth. Even before Charli XCX\u2019s landmark album, the word suggested a young girl, badly behaved, and complaining about something. Rose sets up this suggestive dichotomy, while complicating the very idea of such a dichotomy. Joan rejects both brathood and the pitiful state of France. I was reminded of William Carlos Williams\u2019s declaration that \u201cPoetry is a rival government, always in opposition to its cruder replicas.\u201d Poetry can make apparent the gaps and failures in the rhetoric of politics. Patty Nash\u2019s <em>Walden Pond<\/em> (Third Hand Books, 2024) comes to mind. Nash\u2019s collection similarly tracks the dislocation of the lyric \u201cI\u201d within the formation of the nation state by using different poetic strategies, such as pinching the form of Martin Luther\u2019s <em>Ninety-Five Theses<\/em>. Nash\u2019s and Rose\u2019s poems set their speakers in opposition to the state and to vacuous political rhetoric. The line \u201cI\u2019m not a brat but look\u201d sounds defensive. This Joan is aware of how French forces, church officials, and the <em>paysan<\/em> might perceive and then describe her argument. Joan\u2019s insistence on her own identity, on making someone \u201clook\u201d at the \u201cpitiful state of France\u201d sets her apart from Marine Le Pen\u2019s propagandist Joan. Rose offers a Joan of two minds, a funny and complex Joan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The historical Joan of Arc was born c. 1412 in Domr\u00e9my, a town in the crosshairs of the Hundred Years\u2019 War when England occupied northern France. Joan experienced visions from a young age; God, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret spoke to her and compelled her to fight for the dauphin, Charles VII, at war against English forces. In 1429, Joan traveled to Vaucouleurs, the nearest French stronghold, to convince someone to bring her to the dauphin so that she might rally his French forces. Her plan eventually worked. She had a few successes that led to Charles\u2019s coronation, followed by a few failures. She was captured in 1430 by Burgundian forces, allied with the English king. A bishop questioned her and charged her with heresy for wearing men\u2019s clothes and speaking directly to God (upsetting the strict hierarchies of the Church). In Rouen, she was burned at the stake.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Primary sources about Joan come from the trial for heresy, and a later trial for her rehabilitation in 1456. In France she\u2019s now a national hero, with a festival day on the second Sunday in May to celebrate her nationalism and martyrdom.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rose\u2019s Joan starts a poem toward the end of the book:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t<br>care if I\u2019m<br>ever on a<br>post stamp<br>I just want to see<br>a little more<br>blood run&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This Joan dismisses the political emblem she will become and the symbols that reinforce the state\u2019s idea of itself. (Joan has been on a French postage stamp at least twice: in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1928\/12\/30\/archives\/france-to-have-joan-of-arc-stamp.html#:~:text=By%20an%20order%20of%20the%20French%20Minister,the%20Ministry%20of%20Fine%20Arts%20last%20Summer\">1929<\/a> and in <a href=\"https:\/\/fsspx.news\/en\/news\/france-stamp-will-be-issued-honor-joan-arc-10621#:~:text=February%203%2C%202012.%20The%20Vatican%20post%20office,the%20birth%20of%20the%20Maid%20of%20Orleans\">2012<\/a> to commemorate the 500<sup>th<\/sup> anniversary of the Battle of Orl\u00e9ans and Joan\u2019s 600th birthday.) She\u2019s disarmingly bloodthirsty. Then she gets distracted. The poem meanders from a \u201csolar wind\u201d to a memory of wild carrots. The speaker claims that \u201cdeath was a \/ window we buried\u201d and then ends: \u201con second thought \/ enough blood is \/ enough.\u201d She isn\u2019t a strident nationalist. This Joan keeps thinking, keeps changing her mind.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">How would Rose\u2019s shapeshifting Joan, I wondered, reconcile two of her different public personae? Leslie Feinberg\u2019s cross-dressing Joan versus Marine Le Pen\u2019s conservative and virginal maid of Orl\u00e9ans? Late in Rose\u2019s collection, while Joan is interned in Rouen, she herself invents other Joans: one \u201cwho could survive this suffering\u201d and \u201ca Joan \/ who was guilty &amp; \/ one who was innocent \/ they are lovers now fucking \/ in the cell above.\u201d&nbsp; There\u2019s a tension in Joan, her fervor for battle, her desire \u201cto be plucked \/ out of gender and situation\u201d but also her ambivalence toward her campaign, her restless gaze that keeps lingering on the pastoral, fingering the wild carrot flowers as she rides toward her next battle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There have been so many people who have written about Joan of Arc, one might wonder why revisit her as a subject, but then we would lose the brilliant, intimate portrait Rose animates<em>.<\/em> Rose\u2019s Joan feels personally described. She\u2019s lingering in her own thoughts, so differently from how I think about binary ideas of war, battle, nationhood\u2014which might be my own failure of imagination.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Marine Le Pen weaponizes Joan into a representation of white French identity, riddled with anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia, and a far-right femininity at odds with the real Joan who only wore men\u2019s clothes. Le Pen\u2019s Joan wears a dress under her armor and sports a long, feminine ponytail. The real Joan of Arc had an ugly high-fashion bowl cut, not long tresses pulled back in immaculate hairography. To Le Pen, Joan suggests a political ideology. Shrunk down into a postage stamp, a little square that suggests the country has a history of \u2018bravery,\u2019 whatever that means. Political emblems, the Joan statues and stamps, reduce complexity. (Would her visions be described as mental illness in this century? Did she wear pants to avoid sexual assault while traveling? Did she regret killing people in battle?) Rose\u2019s Joan refuses categorization. \u201cthe distance between me and what I want \/ is constantly deceiving,\u201d Rose writes. The poems approach the slipperiness of experience and historical reanimation. Rose explores questions of solitude, loneliness, desire. At the end of the section Reims to Compi\u00e8gne\u2014the place where historically Burgundian forces dehorsed and captured Joan and her brothers\u2014the text moves from lineated shortish lines into a block of text.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The text box of her future begins with the phrase \u201cof a country.\u201d As if her own country will hem her in\u2014place her in a box, or in a blocky stamp. In the poem a few lines later, she glimpses the \u201cplural \/ light.\u201d In phrases such as \u201cplural \/ light\u201d Rose reminds the reader about the absurd\u2014an attempt to describe something like a shift in the light or rays of sun cutting through the clouds before something terrible happens. Her \u201cplural \/ light\u201d creates texture and tension in the notion of a fixed category: \u201clight\u201d or \u201cstate\u201d or \u201cwar\u201d or \u201cwomen.\u201d In the way she moves through different registers, from text to image, short lines to boxes of prose, one Joan to two Joans, \u201clovers now fucking.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI embraced the \/ world\u2019s smallness when small the world was,\u201d Rose writes, prophesying how narrative might place Joan in a box. But the poems suggest the plurality of experience\u2014a rash decision followed by a change of mind, the absurdity of human-made borders, the fear implicit in bravery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have been thinking about nationalism and bravery because I live in the United States of America and it\u2019s 2026. The pitiful state I live in declared an illegal war in Iran, continues to pay for bombs to drop in Gaza, and deports my neighbors. I get angry and then tremendously sad. Like Joan, by the end of the page I think: \u201cenough blood is \/ enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are many Joans of Arc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17569,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1368],"tags":[3385,3387,1406,2901,3384],"class_list":["post-17567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-jake-rose","tag-katherine-gibbel","tag-poetry","tag-review","tag-university-of-chicago-phoenix-poets","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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Shape: On Rachel Cusk\u2019s &#8220;Life of M&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17563\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/taking-shape-on-rachel-cusks-life-of-m\/m_cusk_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"M_Cusk_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17563\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/taking-shape-on-rachel-cusks-life-of-m\/m_cusk_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"M_Cusk_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17563\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/M_Cusk_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Rachel Cusk | <\/strong><em>Life of M<\/em><strong> | FSG | August 2026 | 192 Pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Life of M<\/em> opens with a pitch: \u201cA little while ago, I told the actor M that I was thinking of writing her autobiography.\u201d M is \u201ca good sport\u201d and tells the unnamed narrator, a writer, to \u201cjust make it up.\u201d The narrator lives as an expat in a cosmopolitan city and is seemingly successful enough to be mutual friends with a famous movie star. M\u2019s incredible beauty, poise, and fame make the narrator feel, in comparison, ugly, uncomfortable, and vulnerable\u2014yet also curious about M\u2019s completely alien way of life. The narrator notices how M\u2019s celebrity renders reality \u201cmalleable\u201d; doors open for her both literally and figuratively, \u201cas though M were always in a film, even when she wasn\u2019t.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, the narrator\u2019s likewise unnamed partner falls ill with a mysterious, grave illness. The narrator\u2019s life becomes defined by the rituals of visiting hours: walking to the hospital each day, watching the bed, and passing time in attendant waiting. Eventually, the narrator explains that the couple will need to leave the city to recuperate, and M responds with sympathy and understanding. Upon parting, the narrator realizes that M\u2019s larger-than-life persona cordons off the possibility of authenticity in their interactions: \u201cI could not be myself around M. She was friendly, generous, disarmingly modest, yet everything I did or said in her company was false. It was as if I was acting, while M came across as authentic and real. It was as if she was the only one good enough at acting to attain reality.\u201d Already the boundary between M\u2019s life and her work is presented as so unstable that it is contagious. Faced with M\u2019s celebrity, even the narrator\u2014who didn\u2019t know who M was when they first met\u2014questions the boundary between authenticity and performance.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After just a few pages, any creative collaboration with M is abandoned, and the narrator evacuates the text. The rest of the novel consists of two alternating narrative perspectives that unfold across passages lasting a couple of pages each. One perspective uses the first-person plural to narrate the movement of residents around a major metropolitan city (almost certainly Cusk\u2019s own Paris, with its \u201cbig ugly tower\u201d dominating the skyline). The narrator and partner are no longer in the text\u2019s diegesis, but they appear to meld into one under this \u201cwe\u201d\u2014the narrational pronoun of a middle-aged expat couple, given to writing in notebooks in caf\u00e9s, visiting museums, and consulting psychics. The rhythms of daily life open up to existential questioning, nostalgia, and reflection: \u201cWe walk our dogs beside the river, striding quickly next to the water. Our bodies need to be exercised. Our bodies are not young and they are not old, they are in some sense ageless or perhaps simply obsolete.\u201d The city serves as backdrop for the couple\u2019s various patterns, and special attention is given to its cruel proximity: some people sleep on the streets, while others (\u201cwe\u201d) step over them; Cusk wryly notes the other quotidian contradictions of city life: \u201cMen on motorbikes and electric scooters fly along\u2026 at dangerous speeds. They wear hard shiny helmets to protect their heads, though the heads of the people walking next to them on the pavements and crossing the streets are bare.\u201d In moments like this, Cusk effects a sort of urban choreography. These passages chart the movement of bodies in space and time as they navigate the contours of city life and respond to the movements of other people.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The other perspective is similarly concerned with the built environment. In these passages, an omniscient voice catalogues the makeup of various spaces in painstaking detail. Each begins with a declarative statement: \u201cIt is a hotel room in a foreign city.\u201d Or&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is an office, square and high-ceilinged, with walls of panelled wood. It is on the first floor of a fine mansion on an elegant street in the old part of the city. The first floor is reached by a polished dark oak staircase that rises up from the ground-floor reception rooms. The panels in the office are of a different wood\u2026&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Eventually, M appears to populate these different spaces, as if they were sets for a performance. She visits this office preserved in a museum to research for a role, but doesn\u2019t appear in the description of this room for five long paragraphs: \u201cThe bookcases, to which for a few moments M has given an appearance of light interest, contain many books about history and geography\u2026\u201d By giving design, layout, and architecture of interior and exterior spaces as much attention as the human activity that occurs within them, Cusk suggests these elements are equally consequential in creating meaning.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In another scene, M participates in a brand-sponsored literary \u201csalon,\u201d in which she features in conversation alongside an author, journalist, and model. A team of people works to ensure the aesthetic precision of the bookstore in which the conversation occurs: \u201cvarious volumes are taken from the shelves and arranged in piles on the low table with an artful carelessness. No one troubles themselves about the fact that the volumes are new and have evidently never been opened.\u201d Within this manicured version of a real bookstore, the women have a rehearsed discussion in front of cameras before conducting the \u201creal\u201d discussion for a live audience; having already been performed, the \u201creal\u201d dialogue emerges as stilted. Here, the lengthy defamiliarized, itemized description works in the novel\u2019s favor: Cusk can expose the absurd constructedness of the \u201cset\u201d because, in this case, it is quite literally a set. Otherwise, though, this style of scene-setting often verges on tedium: the distant voice, <em>sans<\/em> movement to fill up these spaces, renders these settings two-dimensional, fuzzy in the mind\u2019s eye despite the exhaustive detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">M too offers little in terms of narrative momentum. Just like the \u201cshape\u201d of spaces, M\u2019s \u201cshape\u201d\u2014her expressions and gestures, and the gap between her inner self and its outer appearance\u2014is described with the same omniscience. In the office, for example, she performs even without the camera\u2019s gaze: \u201cM behaves charmingly toward the curator. She nods and smiles.\u201d M moves through other spaces\u2014offices, restaurants, hotels, spas, bookstores, and trailers\u2014with the same detached self-awareness. Although she has various, ostensibly upsetting encounters with friends or colleagues, her maintained stoicism constitutes both a performance and a personality. Even in moments that may engender vulnerability, like in an encounter with a vindictive ex or in a theater workshop where participants are prompted to tell a secret, she neither reacts nor lets anything slip from behind the mask of her own face. M as a subject is inseparable from her vocation as an actor and the shadow of her public persona\u2014a phenomenon she is aware of, even suffers from, and yet actively maintains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An actor since childhood, M tells the narrator in one of their few conversations that she does not consider herself to be an artist. Rather, she figures herself as a mere \u201celement in the creations of others.\u201d Only through fame has she gained the power to begin to shape her life, using it to try to make her life \u201cseem more normal.\u201d But between chatting with nannies in school pickup lines, or coffees or dinners with old friends, she is unable to achieve normality\u2014she only further entrenches herself in performance: \u201cIt is her own self that is scripted.\u201d The narrative mentions bad publicity and alludes to personal troubles, but it withholds these insights into M\u2019s \u201creal life,\u201d focusing instead on her constructed response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Overall, both <em>Life of M<\/em> and M\u2019s life emerge through the accumulation of these interactions between her body and the spaces she moves through. This is an alchemic process, sketched through these passages of cityscapes and interiors that resemble visualization exercises or guided meditations. The narrative offers little in the way of dramatic confrontation, change, or revelation\u2014at least, that is, until the novel\u2019s curious final scene.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The publication of Cusk\u2019s <em>Outline<\/em> (2014) marked her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/aug\/24\/rachel-cusk-interview-aftermath-outline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">turn<\/a> from the explicitly personal: \u201cmy mode of autobiography had come to an end.\u201d This formal shift is a direct response to the \u201ccreative death\u201d (not to mention the social and public controversy) she experienced after the publication of <em>Aftermath<\/em> (2012), an extremely personal book about her divorce. <em>Outline<\/em> presents instead the narrator\u2019s \u201cannihilated perspective\u201d; rather than driving the plot in a traditional sense, she instead serves as a conduit for conversation, interaction, and confrontation with other characters.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Following the <em>Outline<\/em> trilogy\u2014the last novel, <em>Kudos,<\/em> came out in 2018\u2014Cusk\u2019s novels demonstrate a consistent interest in art forms other than literature. Inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan\u2019s 1932 memoir about D.H. Lawrence\u2019s maligned stay at an artist colony, <em>Second Place<\/em> (2021) follows a painter, \u201cL,\u201d whose work inspires an ambiguous, dark interest in the narrator and disrupts the latter\u2019s domestic life. <em>Parade<\/em> (2024) chronicles separate narratives about separate artists, each monikered \u201cG,\u201d who in turn resemble Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, and \u00c9ric Rohmer. In an interview with the <em>New Yorker<\/em>, Cusk made explicit her interest in probing the dynamic between creator and creation across different mediums: \u201cLanguage is essentially incriminating: writers are identified mercilessly with their works, yet there is an invisibility\u2014or almost a protective cordon\u2014around the visual artist, to the extent that a biographical approach to the visual arts has been and possibly still is seen as basically unacceptable.\u201d With recent novels focused on visual art, Cusk seems to be writing against this interpolation; if there is a link between writer and writing, her work suggests, then there must also be a correlative relationship between painter and painting. These portraits of artists do not follow a Barthesian schematic that divorces the artist from their art; rather, she insists an artist\u2019s life necessarily informs their work, and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Life of M<\/em> follows Cusk\u2019s post-<em>Outline<\/em> output as an extension and escalation of these dually committed inquiries into novelistic form and the relationship between creator and creation. However, <em>Life of M<\/em> shifts the central medium to acting and performance\u2014a narrative shift that activates a thematic shift. In visual art, as in literature, the art object and artist are literally separated. In performance, however, art and the artist are the same: body and face are both output and material. By casting an actor into the protagonist role, Cusk forces a confrontation with the impossibility of separating creator and creation. M\u2019s characterization demonstrates that this inseparability also leads to a slippage in identity: she cannot be separated, nor interpreted separately, from her art. Even more so, the nature of her celebrity means that the world shapes itself around M\u2014just as she shapes herself around the world.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The novel\u2019s third part marks the return of the first-person narrator, who has just shown M \u201csome of what only I was referring to as our project\u201d\u2014the \u201cproject\u201d being what we have just read. The \u201creal\u201d M disapproves of the work: the narrative portrait is factually inaccurate and offensive in its unfeelingness. She concedes coldly that the narrator can do whatever with the writing, as long as her name isn\u2019t used.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like <em>Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em>, the novel ends with a punchline, delivered in the form of a question from M: \u201cThis might sound stupid,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I\u2019ve been wondering. Are you a guy or a girl?\u201d The novel assumes readers consider the narrator to be female; this interpretation is supported by the fact that all of Cusk\u2019s previous first-person narrators are women, and is reinforced by the narrator\u2019s self-comparison to M, which tends to focus on appearance. This provocative delivery confronts readers with the fact that the narrator\u2019s gender, like their name, has gone unremarked upon. With this, Cusk throws into question both the \u201cshape\u201d the narrator has embodied throughout the entire novel, and the ways that this shape is constructed from readers\u2019 expectations based on past experiences and stereotypes. Yet this sort of feminist twist doesn\u2019t quite land when so much of the novel strips its titular woman down to her body, clothes, and face, refusing her interiority or agency and using these embodied features instead to stand for her whole self, to the actual M\u2019s dismay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the project\u2019s conception of M, the actor \u201cvisualizes a brick wall\u201d in order to go to sleep. She chips away at the brick wall, loosening the mortar around a single brick and pushing it to reveal a \u201csmall rectangle of blank white light.\u201d She continues to chip away at the wall until the bricks fall away and \u201cwhen it is big enough, she crawls through it.\u201d Like this wall of bricks, <em>Life of M<\/em> presents a constructed fortress around its titular character. This is the culmination of the performance\u2014it is her art, and also her life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nature of her celebrity means that the world shapes itself around M.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17563,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1368],"tags":[3383,1430],"class_list":["post-17561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-life-of-m","tag-rachel-cusk","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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&#8220;Our Life in the Forest&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17550\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/our-life-in-the-forest\/darrieussecq_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Darrieussecq_Website\" 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data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Darrieussecq_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"The cover of the book &quot;Our Life in the Forest&quot; by Marie Darrieussecq and translated by  Penny Hueston.\" class=\"wp-image-17550\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Darrieussecq_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Marie Darrieussecq | Penny Hueston (translator) |<\/strong> <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transitbooks.org\/books\/ourlifeintheforest\">Our Life in the Forest<\/a><\/em> <strong>| Transit Books | September 2026 | 136 Pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I opened my eye and <em>bang<\/em>, everything came into focus. It was clear. Almost all of us had our halves with us. And it was scary just how clingy my half was. A sissy. That\u2019s what I called her: Sissy. I had lost all notion of social graces. The only thing that worked with her was to push her around. A bit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Time to get a grip. I have to tell this story. I have to try to understand it by laying things out in some sort of order. By rounding up the bits and pieces. Because it\u2019s not going well. It\u2019s not okay, right now, all that. Not okay at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She was immature, but that\u2019s normal. Considering the life she\u2019d led. Considering the life she had to lead. Well, anyway. But I don\u2019t want to start in on my half. I\u2019m sick of her. I could start with my patient, the clicker. Patient zero, in a way. I think it\u2019s thanks to him that I understand. He went mad, like a lot of people. Because of his work\u2014at least, that\u2019s what he came for in the beginning. In the beginning, don\u2019t we all come for a reason that isn\u2019t the right one? I say that from experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">First of all, let me describe my current situation\u2014right now, because I\u2019ve got a feeling I have to move fast. I don\u2019t have much time. I can feel it in my muscles, in my bones. In my remaining eye. I\u2019m not in good shape. I won\u2019t have time to reread this. Or to write a plan. I\u2019ll just write it as it comes. So:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Around me I see an encampment in a forest. Tents and tarpaulins. Holes in the ground. Braziers. The canopy that protects us from the drones. A pirated internet set-up and a few DIY robots. Composting toilets and iron-fisted management. Back to basics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The main advantage of halves is their flexibility. They can adapt to anything. Their biggest flaw is that they understand nothing. I had to teach mine everything. And I mean everything. Let me tell you: she didn\u2019t know how to walk. And that\u2019s just the beginning of it. Take a big, soft body, almost forty years old, even if she barely looks twenty-five, a gorgeous girl, and stand her upright, verticalize her: she opens her eyes, and then <em>bang<\/em>. She falls down. It\u2019s funny, that strapping young woman all of a sudden on the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I learned how to verticalize during my internship with the babies. It works up to around four or five weeks. After that they\u2019ve grown too much. You grab an infant by the head and buttocks: there it is lying in its cot, pretty well useless, and, hey presto, you verticalize it, put it upright just like you and me. Like the <em>Homo sapiens sapiens<\/em> that it is. And it opens its eyes. Magic. Even if it appeared to be fast asleep. It looks at you, looks around, contemplates its surroundings. It works every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It made us interns laugh, good, affectionate laughter. Anyway, verticalizing my half\u2014I was going to say my intern\u2014was a big deal seeing that she\u2019s as tall as I am, 1.67 meters and half a centimeter, to be exact. I\u2019ve always hung on to my extra half a centimeter. (To tell the truth, she\u2019s a good 1.68 meters tall: she hasn\u2019t been shrunk by life.) Well, anyway. So we worked it out with the other escapees. A few of us got together to verticalize our halves. We held their legs and shoulders by propping them up against a tree. I mean, what hadn\u2019t we already done to them anyway? Well, mine opened her eyes every time. Without fail. And she examined me. It was touching, but uncomfortable. Those blank eyes: dread, there\u2019s no other word. Where do you begin? I told her my name, Viviane, and then hers: Marie. My name\u2019s Marie too, obviously, but I\u2019d chosen Viviane as my fugitive name. You have to comply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Next came walking. Like a baby. It didn\u2019t take long; it was as if their mode of life had somehow instilled in them a certain amount of human data\u2014first walking upright, then speech. The main thing was to beef them up, and to strengthen their tongues and jaws too; in short, to coach them in walking and in speaking. Orthopedics and speech therapy was precisely what we were doing, in the forest. We worked on accentuating their human posture; we made them discover their voice. My professional training was useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Admittedly, we don\u2019t have much to do in the forest. Our activities are limited at the moment. It\u2019s a matter of fleeing in an organized fashion, but fleeing requires a lot of energy, believe me. We can\u2019t risk carrying the halves out on stretchers like we did in the beginning. There are too many of them now. They have to walk\u2014fast. They had to learn to run. They turned out to be useful for cooking, carrying water, digging tunnels and erecting tents, et cetera. Don\u2019t think I\u2019m implying they\u2019re all women; there are men as well as women, of course, and even a majority of men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Right. So where do I start? I don\u2019t think I have to explain the elementary precautions we\u2019re taking. They\u2019re obvious: the jamming of our digital data, of our identities, et cetera. The logistics of our disappearance. Our disappearance, the one they don\u2019t get to decide\u2014that\u2019s what annoys them the most. We have all disappeared. Except that they know we\u2019re here, in a sort of reverse mirror of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The planet is small. We discovered that pretty quickly. I mean, ever since the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Magellan and Cook and whoever else. (Columbus, Magellan, and Cook were explorers.) And ever since we dived into the ocean depths, and onto the Moon and Mars, and Jupiter\u2019s satellites, and then the habitable planets, we no longer really have anywhere to hide on Earth. It\u2019s self-evident. And yet, oddly enough, we still manage it. It\u2019s extremely uncomfortable. You have to forgo what most domestic animals are entitled to: dry straw for shelter, accessible food, care and protection. If you accept having your feet constantly wet, and never again drinking coffee, and if you can forget about hot showers (I\u2019m only mentioning the things I miss most), you\u2019ll manage to stay hidden. To disappear. As long as there are forests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The logical thing would be for them to burn them all down. Or they could stockpile the wood from the native forests and plant huge fields of trees on a cleared forest floor, beneath a checkered canopy: no more undergrowth, no more gloomy light. It\u2019s on the drawing board. But I don\u2019t have time here to elaborate on ideas you already know, and which perhaps (one can only hope) you oppose. I am writing in order to understand, and to bear witness\u2014in a notebook, obviously, with a graphite pencil (you can still find them). Nothing online about it. As lacking in technology as was the huge amount of manual energy expended at Lascaux or in the Sistine Chapel\u2014well, I don\u2019t really want to compare myself to them. (Lascaux is a famous painted cave, and the other place is a famous church, also painted.) I bet my notebook will end up buried in a tin. Perhaps with me, before too long. My half will join me much later, in her own time. Of the two of us, Sissy will have the better life. The best life possible. Sometimes I say to myself that our ultimate aim in life, the most noble thing we can do, is to protect our halves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m the elephant here. I\u2019ve lasted a very long time. It doesn\u2019t happen often, but I\u2019m going to end up in our cemetery, buried with the rites we established for ourselves. At least, I hope so. The vast majority of us die without understanding. Sometimes it goes to my head, the fact that I understand what\u2019s happening. Even if I don\u2019t understand everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Where were we? Time to get a grip. I\u2019m cold. Patient zero, the clicker. Are you aware of what a clicker does? Their job is to teach the robots all our mental associations, so that one day they\u2019ll be able to make them instead of us. Which would allow them to work empathetically, et cetera. The clicker came to speak to me about the infinite tedium of his duties. It is envisaged that the project will be completed in about fifty years. But, until then, the job consists of staying seated in front of your device, and clicking every match between words and images, or words and sounds, or sounds and images, or colors and emotions, that sort of thing. You can even do it in your head if you agree to have your device implanted. You can do it while you\u2019re walking or under the shower, except it requires\u2014as the clicker explained\u2014complete focus. It seems like a mechanical process, but it demands concentration and speed. You\u2019re endlessly performing a task the mind can do but which discombobulates a robot. And which is nevertheless difficult to conceptualize. The only solution is to multiply the links, click, click, click, until the robot has been supplied with everything we could possibly have thought up until now, everything we could have felt, everything humanity could have experienced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Blue = sky = melancholy = music = bruising = blue blood = nobility = beheading. Click, click, click, click, click. I think the last forest will have disappeared before the first robot is up to speed. We\u2019re nearly there. Fifty years. I won\u2019t be around for it. I\u2019ll have fallen to bits by then. I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t have a child. So. The clicker. My clicker, if I can call him that, found himself stuck in a sort of cubicle where, all day long, he had to associate concepts like \u201csadness,\u201d \u201chorror,\u201d or \u201crevulsion\u201d with different types of attacks. Dismembered bodies, et cetera. Eventually, the images left him cold, but he didn\u2019t manage to get himself transferred to another job. He would have liked to work in the artistic section, for example\u2014to associate Beethoven (a nineteenth-century composer) with \u201cbeautiful\u201d or \u201cmusical,\u201d that sort of thing. But the clickers are controlled by somewhat rudimentary robots: it\u2019s a bit like when a shopping website suggests you buy shoes because you\u2019ve just bought some, or go on a cruise because you wrote that you went somewhere by boat. Is the sight of blood always a bad thing? Is it always associated with horror? The clicker was asking himself these sorts of questions, all for a wage of two dollars an hour. Perhaps he was becoming subversive. Clickers get so bored that they spend their time chatting online; indeed, they unintentionally become real snitches. (Some of them do it intentionally.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first thing he asked me to do, when he came to see me, was to stay silent. That was a shock. This is not right, I said to myself. This one\u2019s going to cause trouble. I was trained to formulate a diagnosis, which is not that difficult, and then to steer people toward the most appropriate treatment\u2014toward whatever will do them the least harm, as I say. But that\u2019s already expressing an opinion, it seems. I\u2019m supposed to be perfectly neutral and benevolent. I manage to be benevolent because, for the most part, the patients are in my good books. If I sense something\u2019s not right, I refer them to my supervisor. (He\u2019s a strong-minded man; he even treats deviants.) Well, anyway, once I\u2019ve made a diagnosis, such as hysteria with severe paranoid or obsessive tendencies (I have my own frame of reference, which I adapt according to the case), I listen to them talk for a bit, and then I direct them toward the various methods of treatment. But this particular patient, the clicker, did not want me to touch him, did not want me to speak to him, did not even want me to oversee his treatment. He wanted to ensconce himself in the armchair and, as he told me, rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201c<em>Rest?<\/em>\u201d I said. \u201cDo you have a death wish?\u201d And he replied, \u201cFor pity\u2019s sake, shut up.\u201d So I latched onto the word pity and pointed out to him that death and pity were probably the concepts he would have to deal with most in his profession. But he told me he didn\u2019t want to talk about his profession\u2014that it wasn\u2019t a profession, just a job, hard graft, his bread and butter, slave labor\u2014and that if he could spend the half-hour granted by the occupational medical service, here, doing nothing, saying nothing, just resting and daydreaming, that would be fine, thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because of my diagnosis of \u201cdepressed, suicidal tendencies, possible burnout,\u201d he was entitled to two sessions a week. Seeing him was also restful for me. Once I\u2019d gotten used to the silence. His, but also my own. I have to say that I talk most of the time\u2014perhaps too much. My supervisor says I prattle. The most effective treatment is Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), punctuated every thirty seconds by calming words. Inevitably, I was disturbed by this non-tactile and aphasic patient. My supervisor just said to wait and see. Literally. To be there, dependable. The main thing, said my supervisor, was that the patient knew he could come. The most important requirement of shrinks is that they are there. So that\u2019s what I did. The patient came, and he came back, and he ensconced himself in the armchair, and sometimes I wondered if he was asleep with his eyes open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My supervisor was old; he\u2019d been around for years and had made it into the new era, which meant he was experienced. Thanks to him, I put up with the anxiety of my patient\u2019s silence and immobility. I no longer even asked the question \u201cWhat are you thinking about?,\u201d to which the clicker would invariably reply, \u201cI think I\u2019d do better to rest at my place than stay here,\u201d and I\u2019d invariably reply that, actually, he did not know how to rest. And he\u2019d ask me to shut up, for pity\u2019s sake. When I told my supervisor about the session, he also told me to shut up. So I complied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I first met my supervisor when he was my own shrink. I was living a normal life: I worked, I took my dog for walks (I had a dog permit), I went to see Marie every fortnight. But no one could possibly think it was easy. Because of my circumstances, I\u2019d been granted some free sessions with the shrink, two a week. I\u2019d obtained visiting rights to Marie, thanks to my mother\u2019s persistence. And, all things considered, they\u2019d observed that it did us more good than harm to visit our halves. There was even a period\u2014you might remember it\u2014when they advertised on the radio: in between advice to wash your hands and to drink when it\u2019s hot and to cover up when it\u2019s cold and to stay at home, those who belonged to the Generation were invited to make contact with the Rest Centers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of a sudden, I realize that\u2019s what they were called, Rest Centers; it just goes to show that it\u2019s useful to write things down, in order to clarify your ideas: <em>rest<\/em>, like my patient zero\u2019s favorite word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, anyway. Rest Centers were where they kept the bodies. The bodies of our halves. It\u2019s still done, but I don\u2019t like to talk about it in the present tense. If I talk about it in the past tense, it feels like we\u2019ve won. Where they kept the bodies . . . Back then, we didn\u2019t call them halves. I hadn\u2019t yet fallen in with anyone from the Generation, at least anyone involved with the Generation. Back then, I was going out with a guy called Romero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course, I found it strange seeing Marie for the first time. How old was I? Fourteen? So I began a course of therapy. Two sessions a week to talk about Marie, and talk some more about Marie. Most people, all they do is talk about their parents. Or, if worst comes to worst, about their partner. About their children, their work, their lack of work. And me: about that girl lying there. They\u2019ve really messed us around. And that\u2019s being polite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn\u2019t know I was pretty. At first, it was my narcissism talking. Honestly, I was fascinating. Then I figured out that Marie was much more beautiful than me. It wasn\u2019t exactly a mirror. She was the fascinating one, not me. I tried to get my head around the fact that she was not me. But it\u2019s not easy when you\u2019re faced with someone who sleeps the whole time. We would have had to converse. We would have had to meet. They use the word <em>meet<\/em>, but nothing happened. And yet there was a way of waking them up. Among visitors, we shared tips: speak into their ear firmly, not loudly, but with authority, an authoritative whisper. Their eyes opened. Their eyes opened briefly, as if in response to a large flashbulb. Their eyes opened so wide, huge and, let\u2019s be clear, terrified: we just had time to step back and stare into the large, panic-stricken whites of their eyes. Then their eyes closed again. And their faces sank back into their terrible serenity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Marie is prettier than I am, I said to myself. That should have reassured me, actually. The psychologist from the Rest Center disagreed with me. The psychologist said that we had the same nose to the millimeter, the same eyes, the same smile, the same jaw, everything, everything exactly identical, and so therefore I\u2019m as pretty as Marie. But it\u2019s not true. Back then, Marie seemed to be forever immersed in a milk bath. Even today, her face is so smooth I want to murder her. She looks like the Mona Lisa. (The Mona Lisa is a famous painting from the sixteenth century.) When she was asleep, you\u2019d have thought she was a horizontal Mona Lisa. Mysterious, contemplative. Thoughtful, my ass! Back then I didn\u2019t call her Sissy. That came later, when she had to be taught everything, and was frightened of everything, of the slightest scratch, of life in the forest. No, before we escaped, I called her Marie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Don\u2019t count on me to structure all this coherently. I\u2019m trying to follow a chronological thread, but it\u2019s not working. I should be telling it in order, but in my poor head it\u2019s like a leafy landscape with lots of valleys and alternative paths and people waiting, all half-dead, for me to let them speak, lickety-split. They\u2019re all speaking at the same time, and everything connects with everything else: the past with the present and with the future, what\u2019s happened with what\u2019s going to happen. I\u2019m cold. And my remaining eye is sore, and I keep trying to open my phantom eye. It feels like it\u2019s there, I\u2019m aware of its presence under the scar, I\u2019d just have to wink and all of a sudden it would open, and my phantom eye would allow me to see what I can\u2019t see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The main advantage of halves is their flexibility. They can adapt to anything. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1381],"tags":[2891,3378,3377,3379,3382],"class_list":["post-17506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-excerpt","tag-excerpt","tag-marie-darrieussecq","tag-our-life-in-the-forest","tag-penny-hueston","tag-transit-books","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>from &quot;Our Life in the Forest&quot; - Cleveland Review of Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Is the sight of blood always a bad thing? 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Poetics: A Conversation with Zach Peckham"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17537\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/a-conversation-with-zach-peckham\/zachifand_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"ZACHIFAND_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"A man with glasses and a serpent tongue reading from a book. His name is possibly Zach. \" class=\"wp-image-17537\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1229%2C1536&amp;ssl=1 1229w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1638%2C2048&amp;ssl=1 1638w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1200%2C1500&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17537\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/a-conversation-with-zach-peckham\/zachifand_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"ZACHIFAND_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"A man with glasses and a serpent tongue reading from a book. His name is possibly Zach. \" class=\"wp-image-17537\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1229%2C1536&amp;ssl=1 1229w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1638%2C2048&amp;ssl=1 1638w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1200%2C1500&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/ZACHIFAND_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Zach Peckham |<\/strong> <em>As If And<\/em> <strong>| New Mundo Press | February 2026 | 96 Pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To celebrate the publication of his debut collection of poetry <em>As If And<\/em>, Zach Peckham and I sat down to talk about the relationship between poetry and various kinds of sound: rhetorical babble, idiomatic slang, the bands with whom one changes, and of course, the staged performance of a poem. Playful in a way that does not subvert its sense of panic, <em>As If And<\/em> begets a sonic pleasure unmitigated by the desire for communication. With nods to poets such as Lorine Niedecker and George Oppen, Peckham\u2019s poetry advocates for an ulterior knowledge, language begetting language as melody. Appropriately, too, we discussed Zach\u2019s devoted work as an editor and teacher of literature. Zach, the former Editor-in-Chief of <em>Cleveland Review of Books<\/em>, first hired me as a Contributing Writer in 2021 (this is an in-house celebration! as much in praise of his poems as his catholic editorial tastes), a position that has influenced my critical interests for half a decade. Lucky for me, Zach is and has always been a generous (and funny) interlocutor. Held over Zoom in April 2026, this conversation has been edited for clarity.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Christian Wessels:<\/strong> First question I want to ask you: What did you have for breakfast this morning?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Zach Peckham:<\/strong> I had a banana and a piece of toast with butter and nutritional yeast on it, and a vitamin and this new thing for me, which is a psyllium husk capsule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> What is that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Psyllium husk, so it\u2019s the same active ingredient in Metamucil and similar fiber supplements. Okay. Taking care\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> \u2014of your gut?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Yeah. Trying. You know, the psyllium husk, it\u2019s literally just like hard plant matter. It\u2019s just indigestible fiber that is theoretically good for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> So let\u2019s talk about your debut collection of poems, <em>As If And<\/em>. Is it useful to speak about your writing process, how long it took to compose this volume? And maybe at the same time, you could answer how the poems changed in the process of drafting and revising. This book formally reads like a single sequence, to the point where I can distinguish the poems individually, but at the same time they\u2019re almost unified by a single formal method.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> That\u2019s cool. They originate from a similar place and were written in a pretty condensed period. I hoped it would all be somehow cohesive, if not coherent. Thanks. I trust you. But yeah, I wrote the book during my MFA\u2014it was my MFA thesis\u2014although the version now is pretty different from what the \u201cthesis\u201d was.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> How long ago was that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I finished writing all these poems in 2020, 2021. So that\u2019s one of the weird things: I finished all this stuff like six years ago, and now it\u2019s all \u201cnew\u201d again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> You didn\u2019t touch the poems in the meantime? You were working on other stuff?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I did, but not substantially. I had little obsessive detail granular things. Kind of like just thinking about a word here or there for a year while I submitted it around and got it rejected over and over. Some things shook out like that, which is funny, to have an epiphany about tweaking a line break or fragment three years after you first write it and it\u2019s so clear. I worked on other stuff in the meantime for sure, but it was very hard to write poetry at all, partly because I felt stuck or maybe just too comfortable in the mode of the book, which was done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> When you say they feel new to you, do the poems still feel like your own?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Definitely. I guess they don\u2019t feel <em>new<\/em> to me, but now they are new to the rest of the world. Do you know what I mean? To me, these have been done for years, so it\u2019s been a funny process to get reacquainted with them. I was really scared of that experience but then learned from doing readings from the book over the last couple of months, discussing it in various ways, that, actually, I still totally agree with all of this. I\u2019m still interested in the same things even if I\u2019ve cooled off on some of the specific stylistic concerns and formal techniques that I was really fired up about and working through at the time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Maybe it&#8217;s useful now for our conversation: I can just describe how I see the book operating formally, because we\u2019re sort of talking around it, and please say if this seems right to you, clarify anything. To my mind, all poems are led by sound to varying degrees, but your book is so explicitly led by microscopic inversions of a sonic template, which also seems to be how each poem finds its next word. Each poem starts with a sort of initial sonic conceit, and then the poems are thinking, okay, what would this word sound like if these two letters were swapped around, something like that? Then that word has to go next. Like here, in \u201cPost-World\u201d:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">cinchy winch<br>a narrow clinch<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">snorting chorus<br>in a pinch<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">you are only<br>just an inch<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">away from saying<br>what you mean<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course, this is a general impression, and there\u2019s variation across the book. But where that leads me next is pacing: So many words are split across lines, and much of the book is composed in very short lines. Counteracting that, these poems often have lists that really slow us down with articles, as in \u201cForced Perpetuity\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the lens<br>the lift<br>the lend<br>the sift<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Does all of this seem right to you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> You\u2019re right on the money. I feel like I composed the majority of the book with my ear, thinking about not just my own listening as a generative or compositional tool, but then wanting to share an experience of sound. I am often trying or hoping for poetry that feels like music, not just in that it is \u201cmusical\u201d in an aesthetic or sonorous way but that it can create an effect or experience that feels akin to how listening to music feels, regardless of how it sounds. That\u2019s a very physical concern to me, because playing and listening to music are physical in ways that literature is not. To be honest I kind of feel like music is actually my main creative medium, because it\u2019s what I default to when I have true free time, even though writing is what I spend most of my waking hours and professional life on. Playing and listening to music is so important to me, it\u2019s hard to describe. Which is probably appropriate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Listening drew me to certain choices on the page, like those breaks, those lists. I think pretty often about how the poem on the page is or isn\u2019t like a score. I am trying to treat the poem as a transcript of a sonic object, but that can also be digested visually and create an experience in the inner, mental ear.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This can all be true while also recognizing that it can fail. I have zero control. You know? And people are going to read it how they\u2019re going to read it. But I felt these concerns were useful to me during the process of writing the book. It was my MFA thesis, but it all came at the very end of my time in the program, three years in which I completely changed as a writer, like, very profoundly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> What happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I had gone in with some learned and preconceived notions of what I thought made a poem \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cserious.\u201d Much of that had to do with poetry not rhyming, not being goofy in an unserious or potentially facile or cheap way. I was obsessed with the idea of sounding like a certain kind of Dean Young, David Berman off-kilter wisdom-doling fucking cool guy indie rock shit. I do love that stuff, actually, to be clear. I wrote a lot of that stuff that\u2019s never going to see the light of day. But what I realized during this period of intense, pressurized reading and writing in grad school is that what is actually true to me is sound. I\u2019m not a cool, chill, insightful, collected, organized, insightful person. I\u2019m a fucking spaz. I\u2019m really anxious. I\u2019m scared. I am not comfortable. And one of the ways I cope with just moving through reality is making up these dumb songs in my head all the time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, the first step was just embracing that and leaning into it. I also encountered certain work that provided examples or felt like permission for me. A big one I talk about all the time is Joyelle McSweeney and <em>Toxicon and Arachne<\/em>, which is just maximal. It is decadent in image, in sound. It does a lot, and it does some things that seem a little unsure of its moment, but the work fully commits. Regardless of whether it\u2019s quote-unquote successful, that becomes a poetics. Ronald Johnson is another important one for me. For the sonics and play but also I feel like his work is so often right on the line between so cool and so fucking cornball. This Doctor Seuss-y type shit is risky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But I got really interested in a natural inclination to play with sound in ways that are not <em>just<\/em> hyper musical, but also maybe extend something that I saw in a lot of the Objectivists, in cool, controlled ways, a kind of listening intelligence or sonic sensing. At one point during that process I wondered: Why do all my favorite books have Oppen as an epigraph? Then I went and read all of Oppen. I was like, oh, that\u2019s why. That\u2019s why.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> I remember hearing you read some poems aloud, and where the line speeds me up, you were so slow, so methodical about eliding the sounds across lines. We\u2019ll go back to influence and the Objectivists, but first I want to ask how you hear the poems, their pace, because it feels counterintuitive for me to hear the poems this way. But also, what you\u2019re doing is really dramatizing the sonic focal points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Just to contextualize it: The thing you heard me read last spring was <em><s>cycle hum<\/s><\/em><s>,<\/s> a chapbook that came out from Sistrum Books, which is an imprint run by Ed Steck and Hayley Mulhern of Fungus Books &amp; Records in Pittsburgh, with Ben Pease from the Ruth Stone House in Vermont, who does the printing. That chap became the occasion for a series of sound and text performances with Ceremonial Abyss, where I\u2019d read the book every night with their drones and textures, alongside other poets and performers we liked and wanted to work with. C. had the idea for \u201cthe <em><s>cycle hum<\/s><\/em> <em><\/em>tour\u201d and it really pushed the whole thing into a conceptual and collaborative territory I never would have thought of, which was sick. And a rad, challenging, ultimately insanely fun two weeks riding buses and trains together (Abyss tours without a car, which is pretty fucking rock and roll but also very practical, as long as you can plan ahead and revise the plan every time an Amtrak or Greyhound connection gets cancelled), wondering if I could still hack not knowing where I was gonna sleep every night, unsure if I was just out there rehashing some lost punk dreams or having a midlife crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s interesting, though, that book, I think of it very much as a little release valve from my time working on <em>As If And<\/em>. I felt like there was a still more hyper-granular sonic strategy that I didn\u2019t get to do as much as I wanted to in the longer collection. So there were some things I did reading that work that were informed by and evolved from the performance and collaboration, which I won\u2019t do with <em>As If And<\/em>. But you\u2019re right, I do read aloud deliberately, slowly, because I want to try to project, as much as possible, what\u2019s on the page into space. There\u2019s a longer poem in <em>As If And<\/em> called \u201cLightroom\u201d that is not really granular at all.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> \u201cLightroom\u201d is its own section in the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Yeah, it\u2019s a whole section, and I will read that in more of a cascading and propulsive way. I do try to read everything as it appears on the page to emphasize the sonic qualities, the little parts. I got really into thinking about the material poetics that were possible, and material not from an analytical mode necessarily\u2014you know, material history or social materialism or something. But I feel like in sort of an Objectivist spirit, I am interested in fragmentation and sound and listening, and how these qualities and ideas might map onto questions of political aesthetics. So it became really useful to think of language as material that contains potential meaning and meanings, that changes perception, that can be used for good or ill or whatever. And it felt like sound was the nexus for all of this stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hate utility when we\u2019re talking about poetry, though, because the function of a poem is to be a poem. Like, fucking shut up. That\u2019s it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Can I include that in the interview? \u201cFucking shut up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> That\u2019s fine. Totally. Absolutely. I get so sick of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But also, that is what\u2019s important. Right? Something is still possible there, and I\u2019m interested in being <em>in<\/em> that kind of impossibility, where we don\u2019t know how to function in the world. Poetry is useless, but it\u2019s also all we have. We can\u2019t understand anything, but thought is all we can bring to anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> And form is a way of thinking?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Totally, 100%. I\u2019m not a very hopeful person at all, but I get very hopeful when I consider ideas like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Well, listening to you now, I also noted so much of tone in the book is\u2014I wrote the phrase \u201cpunk-ish disagreement\u201d next to these lines from \u201cBanned Width\u201d:&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">hey you<br>yeah you <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">get dusted<br>you nut<br>you flustered appliance <br>left out<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the sidewalk<br>so hot<br>you wreck <br>you slot<\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">There are so many moments like this, of contrarian address. We\u2019re talking about sound and method, though there are recurring thematic elements. Structures of knowledge. Screens. Technology more broadly as reinforcing those structures of knowledge. Death is the big one. Pathways to death. When you\u2019re composing\u2014and maybe there\u2019s not a way to generalize about this part of your process\u2014what information is prioritized for you when you\u2019re writing? Or is information even the right word?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Good question. I\u2019m often thinking a lot about what I am trying to say, what I can\u2019t say, and what feels totally insufficient to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> For you personally or broadly speaking?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I mean, both. When we\u2019re talking about poems, we use these words like \u201cconfession\u201d or \u201cwitness.\u201d I like a lot of stuff that is actively working in those modes or traditions, to an extent, but at the same time, that shit feels totally fucking useless to me. In all honesty, it actually feels caustic at a certain point or dishonest because we\u2019re witnessing fucking genocide in real time. Our witnessing is really a big part of the problem. And I\u2019m not saying that people should not document all the ways that are possible, anything that is happening that feels important\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> But there\u2019s a contrived idiom for response that fails?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Yeah. That\u2019s often what we are given: This is poetry. \u201cThis is what poetry can do.\u201d And I\u2019m just sort of like, man, fuck off. Miss me with that fucking shit. You know? To me, that mode so often doesn\u2019t fit, I guess\u2014not even the actual experience, but just the actuality of noise and disjunction that one feels every day, the reality of struggling to mean something in language as a thinking expressive medium and always failing, which I am completely obsessed with and excited and disheartened by and terrified of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Listening to you explain witness and confession, I mean, these categories are useful to study poetry, they\u2019re useful for categorizing aesthetic and historical trends, understanding formal diversity and how various kinds of poems can operate, though perhaps using them in our contemporary moment tends to feel reductive, at least when poets embrace those labels themselves of the work they\u2019re currently making. In these cases, perhaps the poems become rhetorically motivated and can feel as if they have an articulable design upon their readers, which becomes a sort of intellectual project and not the embodied visceral experience\u2014which, you know, is what I love about poetry too, that physical sensation of sound and discovery. So there is a way to do it. The question is when a poem is led by the act of convincing someone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I think the work risks being reductive, serving too much of its own productive function, you know, becoming an apparatus in a way. I think what is useful about poetry is that it rejects that functionality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Apparatus to what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Message. Communication. Surety. Rhetoric. You know? I loathe debates. I despise argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Well, if I can tie all of this to your book, the title <em>As If And<\/em> suggests to me how much of this language happens in the middle, so to speak, that we\u2019re not beginning with a conceit. There\u2019s no argument to hold because there\u2019s no idea with which we begin or end.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Absolutely. That\u2019s definitely a bit of my love for the Objectivists coming across there, Oppen, Niedecker. Love for the connective little words and compact clusters, how a line might be crafted against the logic of a sentence, against the logic of a thought to a new thought. \u201cIf\u201d or \u201cof\u201d can take on so much particularity and charge and variance. I\u2019m fascinated by how those sort of utilitarian words and phrases can be made to carry these levels and valences. Sound is a way of pulling some new attention to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> I think we see that today too, obviously in a different way, with poets like Carl Phillips. I read him with admiration, and I think the second most important word in his poetry is \u201chorse,\u201d but the first is \u201cor.\u201d Because his poems are enacting a sense of thought and feeling by way of syntax, and a line inflects that thought happening in real time, a visceral experience, \u201cor\u201d dramatizing those leaps. Anyways, how far back does this influence go for you, Oppen and his generation? Did you study Williams? Do you find him useful for thinking about your own work?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Williams was a lily pad for me, but not because I read him, haha. The first \u201cserious\u201d historically important poet that I really got into when I was coming up was Roethke. I have a little glitch in my poetry brain because I left my college after the first year\u2014Mass College of Liberal Arts\u2014and I was supposed to take this class when I went back called \u201cWhitman, Williams, and Roethke.\u201d I ended up changing course last minute and just working at a bakery, going to community college for a little bit. But I think of those three together in this way that I never actually learned. So then Williams was one that I encountered later but bounced off on my way to finding and probably being\u2014like a lot of boys\u2014utterly corrupted by John Berryman and the <em>Dream Songs<\/em>. He was an early model for me, poetics-wise, corrupted is a good way to describe it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, if we\u2019re thinking about influences, Berryman had this kind of pessimism mixed with silliness. I think this is a sensibility that doesn\u2019t always comport with cool collected thoughts. Although, that is one of the things that I love about David Berman, too. I am a sad millennial man so I obviously love The Silver Jews? But I guess we\u2019re returning to that breakthrough I had in my own development: Poems don\u2019t have to be cerebral or recognizably smart. They can be seemingly or secretly stupid. I\u2019m really interested in that line between decadent and goofy as fuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But then Inger Christensen\u2019s <em>Alphabet<\/em> is such a formative text for me, and is definitely not funny, haha. I count Gustaf Sobin as a primary influence as well. Both are models for sound-as-thinking, leading to political consciousness, political aesthetics. Sobin\u2019s commitment as a life-long amateur is so inspiring, too. I feel similarly about Cid Corman, not only as a model for sonic aesthetics but for living a life of and in poetry (not to ape Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s phrasing too much, but also not-not), where one is not some solitary artist or genius but in fact at their core a dedicated amateur, a listener, facilitator, corresponder, collaborator and conspirator who is always in it with others. I often think of myself as more of an editor than a writer anyway, and that life-craft mess is a nice way to think about editing that is not artificially siloed in professional ideas. Sometimes editing is writing a stupid email. Sometimes it\u2019s making coffee or getting someone a snack. Corman famously ran an ice cream caf\u00e9 in Japan for a while. Ronald Johnson was a well-regarded caterer. Obviously I am a slob and I love to eat and drink. But ultimately I think I am interested in poets who are models for aesthetics as well as approaches to living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> This is music that you grew up with, Berman and The Silver Jews?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t, but I grew up listening to a lot of music that definitely was in his orbit, and then I sort of found him later on. Maybe one simply has to reach twenty-seven to fully appreciate \u201cIn 27 years I\u2019ve drunk 50,000 beers\u201d or twenty-eight to connect with \u201cSelf-Portrait at 28.\u201d Growing up I listened to a lot of punk and hardcore, which ran the gamut, but I especially loved the DC scene and Dischord Records stuff. Later on I got into noise and more experimental stuff the bands I was in in high school and my twenties were trying to emulate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Microphones? Mount Eerie?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Absolutely. All of that lo-fi sad white boy shit too. Elliott Smith obviously. Jason Molina. I love the Elephant 6 bands of the nineties a lot, Elf Parlor, Olivia Tremor Control, The Glands. Instrumental bands like Lightning Bolt, Hella, Mogwai, Don Caballero, Giraffes? Giraffes!, Earth, Boris, Sunn O))), Godspeed, just to name a few, were and are really important to me. ZZ Top was my first favorite band when I was a little kid. My dad had <em>Afterburner<\/em> and this Joe Satriani tape I was obsessed with in his truck. I have always liked guitars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Well, you\u2019re not mentioning a group that is quoted in the book, which is the Insane Clown Posse. How important is ICP to you?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I would say extremely. One thing that I definitely was thinking about with some of the goofiness of the book was my relationship to nu-metal, and kind of what that signifies. There was the rock station in Central Mass, where I grew up, WAAF, \u201c107.3\u2014the only station that REALLY rocks,\u201d and it was just my whole worldview at an early point. Metallica, Slayer, Nirvana and Soundgarden and all the post-grunge butt rock stuff. Creed. Classic nu-metal like Korn and Slipknot and Static X, then the rap-rock moment of ICP and Kid Rock\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Rough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> \u2026and Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, which, like, this is not music I listen to actively anymore. But I\u2019m very interested in embracing these bands or certain things about them as an influence just as I embrace George Oppen and Joyelle McSweeney, if I\u2019m going to lean into a sort of instinctual tendency when it comes to listening and writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Everything should be there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Everything should be there, yeah. I really do think beyond the nostalgia there is actual authentic art happening in some of that music, even if parts of it are silly or even kind of toxic. I think the \u201creal\u201d and \u201csilly\u201d in equal measure or tension are kind of crucially what I\u2019m interested in, especially amid toxin and pollution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Regarding other aspects of your professional life: I think of you as a devoted editor and a devoted teacher. It\u2019s worth noting that you were Editor-in-Chief of <em>Cleveland Review of Books<\/em> for several years and first hired me as a Contributing Writer, so before becoming friends, we knew each other in that capacity. And now you\u2019re teaching at Colby College. So I\u2019m just curious if or how these aspects of your life influence your writing, if at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> That\u2019s a really good question. When I wrote the poems in <em>As If And<\/em>, I was not teaching, I was in school. But since I finished the book, I have spent the last six years teaching as much and as frequently as possible. That was the main reason I did an MFA, apart from wanting to learn and have time to write poetry. Teaching is my main job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Because you were an adjunct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I adjuncted at Cleveland State and at Cleveland Institute of Art. I just said yes to every single class I could get. I needed to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> What was your teaching load like?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> I would teach two classes at each school each semester, usually.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> A four-four load?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> Yeah, between two schools, which is not the most insane thing. I\u2019ve heard of people doing way crazier things, like six comp classes or whatever. But sometimes I had four completely different classes, four different preps. And at some point, usually the middle of the day, I\u2019d have to take the bus from downtown Cleveland out to University Circle to teach at the art school, which isn\u2019t a way of claiming cred so much as just thinking about how I learned to teach.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think it\u2019s sort of difficult for me to say how much those specific practices have really impacted my own creative \u201cwork.\u201d Lately I haven\u2019t spent nearly as much time writing as I have reading and editing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> Do you learn from teaching and editing, though?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ZP:<\/strong> So that\u2019s the next thing I was going to say. I was just reading an essay that one of my teachers, Hilary Plum, who I worked with at the CSU Poetry Center, wrote for a recent series at CRB about Toni Morrison and her editing work. There\u2019s a Morrison quote in that essay that\u2019s like \u201cediting, teaching, and writing is all one job.\u201d Yeah, hard agree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But it\u2019s all the same process. I learn as much about editing from reading as I do from teaching. Though I do think that writing steals away in its own particular manner. I mean, this is such a clich\u00e9, but I really feel like I only ever get anything written when I\u2019m avoiding doing something else. Maybe having a lot to do increases the chances I\u2019ll actually write something at some point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>CW:<\/strong> And now that you have health insurance, you don\u2019t need to put nutritional yeast on your toast every morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I hate utility when we are talking about poetry because the function of a poem is to be a poem<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17537,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1416],"tags":[3380,1424,3381,1922,1406,3150],"class_list":["post-17526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","tag-as-if-and","tag-interview","tag-new-mundo-press","tag-poetics","tag-poetry","tag-zach-peckham","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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Is that very pessimistic?\"","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Interview&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Interview","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/interview\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Cover image for Ariel Yelen's \"I Was Working\"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/WORKING_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/WORKING_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/WORKING_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/WORKING_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":14326,"url":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/from-vision-sans-seraphim\/","url_meta":{"origin":17526,"position":5},"title":"from &#8220;Vision Sans Seraphim&#8221;","author":"Christian Wessels","date":"November 12, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"I. was 9 when I fell from the window for language.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Excerpt&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Excerpt","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/excerpt\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Munson_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Munson_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Munson_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Munson_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 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Little Spatial Instrument: On C\u00e9sar Aira\u2019s Shifting Dimensions"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17489\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/cesar-airas-five\/aira_website-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Aira_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Offset image of Cesar Aira's &quot;V&quot; (Five)\" class=\"wp-image-17489\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17489\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/cesar-airas-five\/aira_website-2\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Aira_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Offset image of Cesar Aira's &quot;V&quot; (Five)\" class=\"wp-image-17489\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aira_Website-1.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>C\u00e9sar Aira | Five | New Directions Press | July 2026 | 384 pages<\/strong><br><strong>C\u00e9sar Aira, transl. by Chris Andrews | Ema, the Captive | New Directions | 2016 | 128 pages<\/strong><br><strong>C\u00e9sar Aira, transl. by Nick Caistor | The Little Buddhist Monk &amp; The Proof | New Directions | 2017 | 224 pages<\/strong><br><strong>C\u00e9sar Aira, transl. by Chris Andrews | The Divorce | New Directions | 2021 | 98 pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Flames the height of Penicillium fungus. A wasp the volume of a speck of dust and its thimble-sized chalet made of cellophane. Destiny compressed to rock crystal. One particle blown from a construction site, resting on a child\u2019s retina, in which a whole house is visible. A replica of a piano constructed to seat a taxidermied fish. A paper foldout containing all elements and possibilities of the universe. \u201c[T]he expanding universe turned toward its infinite contraction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Argentine author C\u00e9sar Aira is obsessed with scale. His literature is of the miniature: He compresses reality and takes to it with a microscope, moves subatomic objects around with invisible tweezers, etches the topography of the moon into a pavement curb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aira has written over 125 <em>novelitas chistosas<\/em>\u2014\u201cfunny little novels.\u201d The output is the byproduct of what he\u2019s dubbed his <em>el continuo<\/em> and \u201cflight forward\u201d method, which means he writes a certain amount every day, pushing on past plot holes, and rarely edits. Aira\u2019s methodological quirk lands somewhere between automatic writing and Oulipian constraint; it is improvisation, game, and creative parameter at once. The effect is that each of Aira\u2019s books has an asymmetry to it, a tilt. Each reads like a fragment of something larger. According to the author, each book <em>is<\/em> a fragment of something larger\u2014a scrap from an \u201cencyclopedia\u201d that has been the \u201chorizon\u201d of his work. There are what Roberto Bola\u00f1o calls, in <em>2666<\/em>, \u201cthe great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown,\u201d and the shorter, more perfect works of the masters\u2014and then there are the many imperfect Airan <em>novelitas<\/em>, a collective, unfinished torrent. Aira has claimed his whole literary career is one big footnote to Borges, presenting his oeuvre as a peripheral, micro-spatial project, tunneling beneath already miniature texts\u2014as if capable of triggering an infinite textual regress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miniaturism, for Aira, is thus a formal method, a style, and a primary subject matter. That Aira\u2019s page count is typically around the 100-mark isn\u2019t all that makes him a miniaturist; he is a miniaturist in the phenomenological sense. Standard literary theory states that miniaturization serves a dual purpose: a tool for containing the world; a space that induces reverie. Both involve the sense of comfort that comes with grasping an object in your hand. An expanse hides within the <em>novelitas<\/em>, ready to disturb that comfort. This miniaturism is Dadaist and absurd: not a way to make reality safe and controlled, but a deliberate destabilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aira attains scalar instability in a number of ways. He is particularly fond of deploying a capricious plot pivot. He writes as though coming across something, some sudden mutation or temporally incongruous maneuver casually attributed to, for instance, an \u201carchitectural effect,\u201d glitch, or memory loss. The story\u2019s action may happen within a memory of a conversation about misremembering a movie that aired on TV; he may open the novel trying to figure out how to begin, as though he\u2019s left his notes in the published version. (It is sometimes too ridiculous.) He tends to dip into essayistic digressions, macro lenses floating at whim into his micro-stories. Theories proliferate. These idiosyncrasies serve to manipulate the space-time of the novel, stretched and warped within the pages of these small books.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aira tips the scales, and the ostensibly insignificant becomes tectonic. Peripheral details become major events. In Aira\u2019s universe, the secret key is found in the flimsy, the overlooked\u2014the workplace manual, the bureaucrat\u2019s notebook, the trashy magazine. The newsstand, grocery store, construction site, street vendor, corner caf\u00e9\u2014each is treated as a site of complex logic, where an event of cosmic circumstance could easily occur unnoticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One summer morning at a caf\u00e9 in Buenos Aires, in December 2007, the late poet Kent Johnson had coffee with the artist Leticia Obeid. The owner of the caf\u00e9, El Gallego, unfurled the awning above their sidewalk table to offer some shade. But there had been a storm the night before, and El Gallego\u2019s unfurling dumped a cascade of rainwater onto a passing bicyclist. As it happened, the bicyclist was no stranger but Enrique, an old friend of Obeid\u2019s. Johnson, too, recognized the drenched man: He was the owner of the Palermo pensi\u00f3n where he was staying. To make the event even more surreal, the still-dripping Enrique runs into his mother, right there on the sidewalk. And then Johnson goes off to meet the famous Argentine author C\u00e9sar Aira, to whom he tells this strange tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Upon hearing the story\u2014as Johnson wrote in his pseudo-memoir-in-encounters <em>I Once Met<\/em>\u2014Aira guffaws, claps, and says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[It was] a reminder that a whole dimension of quantum strangeness most certainly waited for moments of entanglement with diffident smirk and bearing behind our own dimension, which is\u2014our dimension, that is\u2014a kind of \u2018ontological dementia\u2019\u2026 and that the clarity and purity of the former seeps through, now and then\u2026into the banal forgetfulness of the latter\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Following this, Aira leaves abruptly, presumably to begin sketching what would become his 2010 novel, <em>The Divorce<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Divorce<\/em>, narrated by Kent, a recently divorced tourist from Providence, Rhode Island, occurs within the freeze-frame moment of the sidewalk drenching. The anecdote at the core of <em>The Divorce<\/em> \u201creally happened,\u201d Aira says. \u201cI transcribed it without changes,\u201d limiting himself only to filling in the instant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kent acts as a spout for a series of stories radiating from Enrique, the drenched bicyclist. First, he and Leticia meet in the midst of a burning boarding school, from which their only escape is into a scale model of the school, kept on a billiards table in its basement. The adventure is a series of crumbling facades. In one of Aira\u2019s most striking images, thousands of moths flock to the flames and create a simulacrum of the building before turning to ash. Within the walls of the secular school hide Jesuit priests, their presence repeated in atomic size inside that \u201cmagical doll\u2019s house\u201d with toothpick beds and a piano that could only be played by a \u201ccreature from the realm of almost nothing.\u201d<br>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Enrique and Leticia don\u2019t actually make it <em>out<\/em> of that miniature boarding school within the active narrative, leaving us with the impression that each successive tale exists on a different plane. The plummet into a miniature realm where \u201ceverything [is] more immediate\u201d is the book\u2019s <em>mise en abyme<\/em>. In both Gaston Bachelard and Susan Stewart\u2019s foundational theories of scale, the attraction of the miniature lies in a feeling of possession: We see its wholeness, we feel safe; we can project ourselves inside it or feel god-like above it. Aira\u2019s miniature makes this fantasy ersatz: The model in the basement does not provide a feeling of power or a means of escape. It does, however, open up an infinite landscape from within. Diminutive space such as a dollhouse evokes an immense interior expanse, and with Enrique and Leticia left in that little burning building, the psychological magnitude of the miniature absorbs the narrative above. At the end of the chapter, we\u2019re told that \u201cthere is no other world than this.\u201d We snap back to the caf\u00e9 with Kent to find that the nested stories are the entire novel: the metadiegetic level of <em>The Divorce<\/em> subsumes its frame.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No matter how fantastical, Aira stays materially in the world\u2014the minor goddess of ice hovers through bourgeois Palermo Soho; a sculptor\u2019s apprentice, who had a life-changing experience with the child god Krishna during a childhood of poverty, is abused by an alcoholic artist and his hungry dogs; Enrique\u2019s mother does what she has to do to run the family business after her father dies, potentially magical office manual notwithstanding. Aira\u2019s <em>mise-en-abyme<\/em>-on-fire never stops burning because it is a traumatic memory, set off when the characters all run into each other on the sidewalk. The initial coincidence is a collision; all of the miniaturized histories whizz outward upon impact. As readers, we experience the stories both as a burrowing further into the scale model world, and as pocket worlds that act like balls on the billiards table where the model of the school sits, and which have fractured the linear and collectively swallowed it up.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><br>\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In <em>Margarita (A Memory)<\/em>\u2014kicking off <em>Five,<\/em> the new New Directions collection\u2014the anxiety of encroaching adulthood and a watershed election is compressed into toys and fables. Our narrator, an Aira avatar, is going on eighteen against the tense backdrop of 1957 Argentina, during the standoff between Arturo Frondizi and Ricardo Balb\u00edn in the shadow of Per\u00f3n. Memory has the tendency to jump, shift, and blur, and the emotional intensity of a late adolescence or a precarious political moment only exacerbates that sensation. Aira collapses the 1957\u20131958 period into a very brief <em>novelita<\/em>\u2014reportedly written on index cards\u2014about a dreamy summer with the Snow White-esque Margarita. She breezes into town as guardian angel\u2013governess to her elderly attorney father, who, Aira tells us, represents Argentina\u2019s past: \u201cthe nation&#8217;s fate, the ship of state on its hazardous course, political commitments, oligarchic paternalism, populist deference.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Margarita<\/em> constantly shrinks the gigantic abstract down to domestic, interior size. Margarita herself seems a \u201cchronological mistake,\u201d both a distraction from political chaos and grid failures and an embodiment of temporal distortion. In the span of her young life, there have been \u201ca series of political upheavals and revolutions that, in the history of another nation, would have occupied centuries.\u201d Margarita and her father move into a lodge designed gratis by avant-garde architect Francisco Bullrich; the romanticism of her mother\u2019s death by a duel\u2019s spare bullet seems straight out of a locked-shut storybook. They sequester themselves from the intensity of the political shifts outside, a brief refuge from the legal scandals that keep the father in perpetual exile. Margarita\u2019s survival tactic involves a \u201clittle collage world\u201d that folds up into a cardboard suitcase. Meanwhile, the narrator\u2019s family has an onyx figurine of Frondizi on their mantelpiece; a Balb\u00edn doll is taken out at night and stabbed with needles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Obsessed with Oscar Wilde\u2019s essays and infected with the compression-mania of his household, our narrator sees Margarita as the fairy tale figure she has been abstracted into by those around him. Margarita teaches him to live outside the page, beyond the diagram\u2014and yet she remains \u201cat a slight remove from concrete reality,\u201d suspended and idealized. If Margarita had stepped out of a fairy tale, \u201cI was the imaginer entering open-eyed into my own creation,\u201d he recalls. He treats her like a creature of fiction sent to distract him from his fear of growing up and entering the adult sphere of blackouts and dictators. The pair hide in a pastoral microcosm. Away from the turmoil, Margarita and the narrator enter an enchanted forest, a haze of secret chambers. The prose here is folkloric, ethereal: \u201cThe forward flight had come to a halt in a golden quadrant. Space folded over time, and new images of the two of us appeared on its various undersides: Margarita and I falling through fogbanks, weaving our way through the sleeping steers.\u201d The outer world disappears when the pair drop into this snow globe of sylvan detail. But the dream is shattered when Margarita and her father abruptly skip town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our narrator is inconsolable. He is so distraught at the departure of his friend that he wishes for ants to tear him to pieces, to be rid of the \u201chorrible unity\u201d of his body. At the story\u2019s close, he imagines Margarita living in a hut in the distance. She shifts scale in his mind as he tries to grasp the truth of her absence. She is first \u201clike Alice, a real girl in a dollhouse high on a mountain, serving tea, one drop at a time,\u201d and then she is \u201cwandering, lost, and tiny, as I would have liked her to be, so I could have held her in the palm of my hand, and talked to her, smiling.\u201d He turns Margarita into a souvenir of herself, squishing her into an image of domestic fantasy that could be played forever\u2014displacing both the reality of her egress and their summer together. Ultimately, this denial of the passage of time fails; reality can no longer be scrunched up into a pocket-sized myth. What is a figurine in the face of grief? Only a fragment. When the boy runs home to his mother in tears, he realizes his friend is too real for \u201cthe mutant dimensions of a fable.\u201d The image short-circuits; the container explodes. She has real girl legs that walk away; in her wake, she leaves a void. Even the moon begins to disappear\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aira marks every novel and story with the date of its completion. His debut novel, <em>Ema, The Captive<\/em> (1981), is timestamped October 21, 1978, in the middle of Jorge Videla\u2019s far-right military dictatorship. State-sponsored propaganda celebrated the centennial of General Roca\u2019s Conquest of the Desert the following year; leftist guerrillas dubbed themselves Montoneros after the nineteenth-century militias that fought centralizing forces out of Buenos Aires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Miniaturism functions here as a Dadaist mode of subversion. <em>Ema<\/em> drifts languidly in a liminal period between the nation-state unification of Adolfo Alsina\u2019s frontier campaign and Roca\u2019s brutal conquest, which would ultimately establish the modern Argentine state by way of centralized borders, national military power consolidation, and an agro-export economy. None of this is referred to explicitly, only implied with a yawning, anachronistic irony. Mostly, we follow Ema, a young mother who roams the frontier as concubine, wife, and indifferent captive to various men\u2014a Frenchman, a soldier, a king, and a zoological engineer among them. As the late Sergio Chejfec <a href=\"https:\/\/4columns.org\/chejfec-sergio\/ema-the-captive\">noted<\/a>, Aira establishes his relationship with the great looming shadow of the nineteenth-century realist novel: temporal structure and social types are intact, but psychology and conflict are replaced with paradox and surrealist imagery. Everyone is preoccupied, bored, and obsessed with gambling. The colonizers and the Indians are all busy inventing capitalism, setting up a new model of transactional reality: \u201ca comedy of extortion.\u201d Aira presents the network of currency as both absurd and as a way for Ema to, eventually, attain a kind of autonomy\u2014by the end, she has her own pheasant-breeding operation, thanks to a minister\u2019s desire to flood the system with Victoria-printed bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The characters of <em>Ema<\/em> traverse and occupy the Pampas, where a landscape of vast, unstable dimensions warps all sense of proportion. The primary settlement fort appears as a \u201cmotley toy city\u201d of \u201cchaotic hives.\u201d Passing dwarf cha\u00f1ar trees, travelers feel \u201clike giants treading a miniature forest\u201d; they see a mantis the size of a dove. There\u2019s a garden with \u201cthe air of a miniature\u201d and a beach \u201cof fine sand where everything seemed microscopic.\u201d The natural world squirms and shapeshifts beneath endeavors to contain it; the puckish language pantomimes the era\u2019s pathologies. Many of the men seem to be driven mad by the Pampas\u2019 sublimity, its unmanageable size mocking the colonial conquest. Aira\u2019s scalar oscillations show the anxiety at the core of the expanding state\u2019s attempt to tame and constrain: the fear of being small. Using the framework of theorist Alfonso de Toro, the critic Djibril Mbaye writes that \u201cArgentina can be considered a miniaturization of the center\/periphery relationship.\u201d The Conquest of the Desert was the attempt of Buenos Aires\u2019s ruling class to construct a wealthy state modeled on France or England\u2014a self-inflicted miniature replica of European colonialism that tried to squeeze a geographical immensity into a capitalist maquette.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While the men are occupied with their state-building schemes, Ema slips between the lines. She gets the idea for the pheasant farm while studying maps. Fully open, the \u201cfine, wrinkly paper\u201d covers most of the floor in the small room; folded, they fit in her pocket. \u201cBeautiful miniatures stood in for absent inscriptions: the capital with its palaces and bridges, villages in remote clearings, and even the fort in Pringles and the settlement.\u201d Her favorite map shows pheasants. \u201cThe bigger the drawing, the more birds it stood for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ema finds in this graphic abstraction a world made of rearrangeable symbols. \u201cAs for the birds themselves\u2026 she realized that they were shards scattered by a prodigious shattering of passion, and that their colors were signs of absent thoughts.\u201d Her observations have a cosmic tilt, whereas men like the minister insist \u201cThe real [is] the State\u201d and its currency. She goes off to create her own miniature commercial empire, turning herself into one of the birds on the map\u2014like a character from a children\u2019s book diving into an illustration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a rare author\u2019s note, Aira divulges that he came up with <em>Ema<\/em> while sitting in a Pumper Nic\u2014a much-nostalgized, defunct Argentine copy of Burger King. Aira calls Ema \u201cmy miniature self,\u201d who instilled in him \u201cthe passion for which all others can be exchanged, as money is exchanged for all things: indifference.\u201d Politics raging outside the Pumper Nic insists on grand national myths, so Aira turns small and ridiculous, his avatar navigating a frontier of monetary schemes and ostentatious pheasants like a board game. It\u2019s as if he took an old rotting book, hollowed it out, and stuffed his own weird little objects in there.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">During the heyday of imperialist expansion, the popularization of the microscope and subsequent codification of germ theory engendered a profound cultural anxiety that, beyond the measurable world, nested invisible universes. If the microscope could reveal tiny alien monsters living in a drop of drinking water, then an unseen world of fairies was not outside the realm of possibility\u2014and maybe all those maps and classifications were balderdash, too.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A nineteenth-century cartographer or taxonomist wanted the world to behave linearly, like a stable, classical particle. nineteenth-century nonsense writers poked at this unease, parodying colonial categorization-mania and the absurdity of encyclopedic knowledge. In his book-length essay on nineteenth-century limerick writer Edward Lear, Aira suggests that, within the limerick, Lear accessed a realm below the atom\u2014specifically, the realm of the quantum. In quantum thinking, wave-function dictates that matter isn\u2019t fixed in one place; rather, it\u2019s a cluster of overlapping probabilities until measured. According to Aira, Lear\u2019s limericks have a \u201ccompulsive and frenzied movement\u201d that leaves waves of superimposed afterimages. Within a very brief space, the characters appear to teleport, making quantum leaps across lines of verse, boundaries of time and space completely irrelevant. Lear\u2019s figures are a cloud of absurd, unresolved possibilities. Each little poem is so compressed and chaotic that its energy ripples outward. Instead of treating the nonsense poem like a classical particle, Aira treats it like a quantum wave, vibrating with unpredictable energy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>\u201c\u00bfQuieres coger?\u201d<\/em> What vibrates with more unpredictable energy than bored hormonal teenagers? In <em>The Proof<\/em> (1992), Marcia is on her daily after-school walk when she enters a dense, enchanted space that is both the street and \u201ca fortuitous moment of the evening.\u201d Clusters of long-haired youths in leather jackets loiter on this corner in Plaza Flores, near the mall and the record shops, yelling <em>\u00a1Boludo!<\/em> back and forth. The Cure is playing (probably <em>Disintegration<\/em>). Marcia, chubby and uncool, would typically pass through unnoticed. \u201c[S]he felt she was gliding along too rapidly, like a body in the ether where there was no resistance\u201d\u2014as if Aira had plucked her out of a vacuum to bump around in his particle accelerator. (It\u2019s also what growing up feels like: the notion that there must be a story waiting for you\u2014without it, nothing matters.) Suddenly, the weight of reality changes; time becomes denser. Marcia can feel the story condensing around her. It seems that \u201cnow, anything could happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cornered by punk girls Mao and Lenin, Marcia\u2019s life transforms. In a Pumper Nic, Mao tells Marcia that they must reject \u201cthe world of explanations\u201d for the intense speed and energy of lightning, and the trio heads to the Disco supermarket to cause chaos. Time shrinks into a \u201cvertiginous instant\u201d once the punks padlock the grocery store doors. All the action from here on out occurs within a \u201cpacked continuum.\u201d Glass rains between Fruit and Veg, a man in plastic overalls catches fire climbing through yogurt, a woman is beheaded. Her lopped dome soars over produce aisles as crowds trample and the cleaning department explodes. A woman melts into a monster with stretched and twisted limbs while singing more beautifully than Maria Callas, a rainbow forming above her. She becomes all things at once, a living Aleph, and yet is \u201cno more than a gaze, a tiny insistence.\u201d Only five minutes have passed when the girls leave the scene unscathed and disappear back into the streets of Flores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aira calls his trio the Three Marias, the naming itself a compressional sleight of hand. Explicitly, they are the three bright stars of Orion\u2019s Belt, tethered in Argentina to the trio of holy women from the Catholic gospel. Implicitly, they are also the adolescent girls of Rachel de Queiroz\u2019s 1939 <em>As Tr\u00eas Marias<\/em>, and The Three Marias, the Portuguese women whose 1973 obscenity trial for their collaborative feminist text made them folk heroes. The pulsating novel ends with a readymade matryoshka doll, folding the celestial, the political, the hagiographic, and the literary into one glittering marble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nearly a century after Lear, Werner Heisenberg put forth his uncertainty principle: At a certain point of reduction, the instruments of measurement inevitably disturb what they are measuring. In Aira\u2019s quantum science of the novel, articulated in his introduction to Copi\u2019s <em>City of Rats<\/em>, \u201cspace-time is a maquette\u201d\u2014an architectural model, a sketch for the way reality operates, a miniature structure you can turn around in your hand. At the subatomic level, standard rules of narrative gravity go out the window. Qualities cease to apply, hierarchies dissolve, and \u201cwe float on the same level as everything else.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In <em>The Proof<\/em>, Aira uses this quantum logic as a metaphor for the jittery drama of adolescence, but also as a narrative prank against misogynist political structures. Like Lear\u2019s figures, the girls tunnel quantumly, going so subatomic they loop to the cosmic. In their leap to the stars, they don\u2019t just break out of societal rules but escape the rules of \u201creality\u201d itself, ascending to myth. Aira\u2019s Three Marias resist any measurement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In <em>The Dream<\/em> (1994), newly translated for <em>Five<\/em>, a neighborhood newsstand becomes involved in a mad conspiracy involving malevolent robotic nuns, a sensational bank embezzlement, and the local shelter for single mothers, where the newsstand stores their overstock. At the peak of this fast-moving tale, Aira manipulates scale to freeze time within a thronged chapel. The scene is arranged as a \u201cCaravaggesque deposition.\u201d Aira pauses to break the chaos down into rapid-fire close-ups\u2014a hand, a foot, a gasping mouth, a cornice, a niche\u2014using the page like a physical miniaturist who slows time with granular textures packed onto a minute surface. We stare at each corner of the chapel, flesh in freeze-frame, \u00e0 la Caravaggio\u2019s flash of chiaroscuro catching his figures mid-gesture. Elsewhere in <em>The Dream,<\/em> there is an attempt to map knowledge onto a city street seen from above, a labyrinthine underground realm with its own set of rules, and tea that alters perception by the microsense. At one moment, it seems the title may refer to the entire hallucinatory sequence of events\u2014but no, the dream in question is one our protagonist Mario had about the Argentine football team Racing Club improbably winning the championship. This dream\u2014like <em>The Proof<\/em>\u2019s quantum condensation\u2014makes anything seem possible.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To solve one piece of the mystery, Mario tracks down an old copy of the women\u2019s lifestyle magazine <em>Para Ti<\/em> in a local woman\u2019s archival stash. At first, Mario doesn\u2019t find anything of note\u2014why would he? It\u2019s just a silly magazine, right? And, anyway, the clue could have been hidden anywhere. \u201cIn the atomic composition of the paper. In a typographical error, which might have created a magic word.\u201d But then he does find it\u2014in a seemingly innocuous article on fertility. <em>Para Ti<\/em> is the most widely read women\u2019s lifestyle magazine in Argentina\u2019s history, a class-transcending, generation-spanning domestic handbook that has also historically been the site of conservative dogma. In her <a href=\"https:\/\/geography.washington.edu\/sites\/geography\/files\/documents\/research\/farias_womens_magazines_socioec_change_2015_0.pdf\">study<\/a> of the magazine, scholar M\u00f3nica Far\u00edas notes that in the mid-1990s, <em>Para Ti<\/em>\u2019s rhetoric partitioned the single and married as well as the public and private space: if the home is not to be infiltrated by politics, then neither is the woman. Burying the key inside this ostensibly trifling feminine manual, Aira acknowledges, in his droll way, that tools of control are often found in the most mundane places.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Hurrying off to save the day, Mario notices his newsstand: \u201cSeen from a distance, as now, it was a miniature, a little spatial instrument. In miniature, figures become more precise. Not by magnification, but its opposite: they shrink, shrink, and take on a polish in the air.\u201d The network of Buenos Aires is held entirely in this small, folding kiosk. Political systems can be found hiding within the configuration of their magazines\u2019 stories; each thin newsprint page could hold the combinatory code to the universe. This is how Aira\u2019s novels work, too. Usually, we look at miniatures as a way to make life safe and manageable, to hold what otherwise can\u2019t be held. Aira packs his with dense hyperreality. His narratives are spatial instruments\u2014accelerated, pressurized, microcosmic gadgets. They reflect the frantic speed of reality outside, burrow inside our smallest, subatomic details, and point to power structures hiding right there on the open page.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> It is as if he took an old rotting book, hollowed it out, and stuffed his own weird little objects in there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1368],"tags":[3372,3376,3375,2901,3374],"class_list":["post-17488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-five","tag-leah-mandel","tag-new-directions-press","tag-review","tag-v","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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Waves"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"16373\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/cemetery-gates\/fiction-rectangle_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fiction Rectangle_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" 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data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Fiction Rectangle_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"A drawn blue rectangle \" class=\"wp-image-16373\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=1229%2C1536&amp;ssl=1 1229w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=1638%2C2048&amp;ssl=1 1638w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=1200%2C1500&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Fiction-Rectangle_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The psychiatrist specialized in sleep disorders. The first day we met in his private clinic he explained he was into rules. This was well before we began a relationship outside of the confines of his north London office that overlooked a pretty, gated square; one of those secret gardens that sit in tiny pockets across the city, locked away from those without permission to enter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hadn\u2019t expected him to be handsome, just old \u2014 turns out he was both. He had soft dark grey hair that fell in wafts around his face. I liked the way his green eyes were sharp and yet empty, they matched his tie. The tiny red vessels on the surface of his nose moved up and down as he spoke, often at length. Insomnia had made me pay attention to these kinds of details. I became hyperaware of the body and its tricks.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On that first day, I learned rule number one: the bedroom should only be for two things \u2013 sleep and fucking. All other activity was prohibited. He spoke plainly in a crisp London accent, crisp as a blade. I admired the way he leaned back in his rotatable chair like a throne, except when his stocky torso would gesture forwards at moments of scientific explanation when he became the most animated. He discussed everything from the early zebrafish research that was fundamental to how we now define the circadian rhythm to human experiments which entailed locking up participants in completely windowless rooms for a month with no sense of time. Participants would have their meals delivered when they wanted and could sleep or stay up for as long as they felt was appropriate. No clocks allowed. People with long sleep cycles would sleep for more than twelves hours each night. At the end of the experiment, this group of participants would be surprised when the research leaders released them, feeling the month had passed by all too quickly. For those with short sleep cycles only feeling the need to sleep for a few hours at night, a day would pass in a fraction of a real one. They would cycle through multiple short days so that a month period would be felt as more than two. The experience must be akin to hell, the sleep psychiatrist would say before laughing showing off his little irregular teeth.&nbsp; He liked to explain things to me often. I liked the sense that I could be of use just by listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had been feeling useless for a long while. It was spring and I hadn\u2019t slept properly for eight months. My family doctor, Dr. Link who had treated me since I was a child with frequent ear infections and a mild case of sebaceous acne, had only started to worry when I stopped getting my period. When I told Link this, he looked up for what felt like the first time in six months. I had gotten so used to seeing the top of his shiny bald head. It was a shock to see the downward pull of his now sagging face. I was told this was now very serious indeed, as he jabbed away at the keyboard in front of him, entering his findings into my notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had noticed things were serious much earlier, when my hair had started to thin, falling out in soft drifts overnight as I tossed and turned in bed. I began collecting the dark strands that became clumps and eventually bought a large glass jar to contain the growing mass of keratin. The jar became darker and darker until completely blacked with hair. The more hair, the less sleep I\u2019d had. This was my only tangible way of keeping track of anything real in the world, one strand at a time. Not being able to sleep is a kind of torture, in the sense you never know what is real anymore, with the exception of something as real and undeniable as hair. You lie awake never dreaming, only thinking about the light in the room changing gradually as dawn arrives and you remain unsleeping. Unsleep is a territory. A limbo state dislocated from the world. An insomniac moves around differently in their exhausted body. The brain fidgets uncontrollably like a flapping fish caught up in a fisherman\u2019s net. You lie there in a state of continuing, hoping the fish plays dead, and doesn\u2019t get put back into water for as long as possible. I remember my mother returning from night shifts at the care home she used to work at, half-awake zombie-like as she made us breakfast. How she pulled on her dressing gown over her normal clothes just to keep from shivering. Her cheeks sallow, almost green with exhaustion. Now I get out of bed and spend my time up late, staring out the window. I like to listen to the rumble of infrequent cars passing by, wondering where they are headed. You begin to pay attention to the sound of the nighttime as if you could hear the swelling and contracting of the air outside the window.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had no choice but to take any help I could get and the sleep psychiatrist had come highly recommended. We began to meet once then as often as twice a week in his office. As well as his detailed explanations, almost lectures, he often elaborated with diagrams that he signed off at the bottom with his signature, like the time he drew me a tank of oil. His hand was steady as he cut through the piece of white paper as pale as his hand with his Montblanc. I noticed his fingers tapered towards the ends, the nails were cut neat, he wore no ring. He said, pointing to the diagram, this was my sleep tank: the oil was the daytime activity I would need to do if I had any chance of filling it up, in order to sleep peacefully at night. He made three flamboyant slashes with his inky pen to highlight the area of activity, or oil, I would need to collect. His eyes met mine as if a gaze could make a sound as it struck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After our second session when he put his hand on my thigh and up my skirt, which wasn&#8217;t strictly required for the examination, I felt the cool energy of his palms against my tights, something trance-like about the way the sleep psychiatrist hovered awkwardly over my body, and yet, I still felt exhausted. He said he could sense my jangled nerves, the depleted serotonin levels which all contributed to my sleep disorder, presumably he had detected this under the skirt. As he lingered, his coffee and cigarette-stained breath felt cool against my neck. I could see people walking through the square below between the trees, their bodies popping in and out of frame. I felt like a bird looking down on the world. Life had become a kind of big dull mosaic that you could only really pay attention to in small segments at a time, the whole picture remaining elusive \u2014 I really did want to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of my habits is to cover the lower part of my face with my hand when asleep, usually in the middle of the day having been up all night. The psychiatrist made a note of this in his leather notebook and often commented on it whilst we were in the middle of making love on his kitchen floor. He liked to do it there \u2014 aware of his bedroom rules, he used to joke and say \u201cNo one said anything about fucking in other rooms.\u201d From far away, with my hand over my nose and mouth, it looks like I\u2019m smelling a pleasurable thing tucked inside my palm, or as if half-way through gasping, either experiencing pain or pleasure. The sleep psychiatrist said I look like a child unconscious to the world; this is a way he could relate to me. I found this strange as he had no children of his own. His wife left three years before and he didn\u2019t mention her name, although I often heard them speaking on the phone late at night. The sleep psychiatrist often thought I slept, that through his years of experience he had cured my insomnia within a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, I lay awake listening. I could almost feel his hot breath spitting in sharp whispers around the words, \u201cyes, yes,\u201d \u201cfine,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll send some.\u201d I had the feeling it wasn\u2019t just money, but feelings involved in these late-night calls, although it was hard to tell as he seemed rarely to show anything more than flickers between the extremes of pleasure and absolute seriousness. He just sipped at his sparkling water that he drank exclusively from glass bottles his housekeeper, Magda, kept stocked in his fridge. I got used to hearing the hissing of a fresh cap being opened. I knew he kept one dedicated diary for me, noting down my movements including frequency of bathroom breaks, conversation, type and size of meals. The scrutiny was reciprocal;&nbsp; as I watched him surreptitiously take down his notes I was considering him, too.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One evening after he finished, we lay on our backs on the glossy tiles in his kitchen, expertly buffed by Magda, who practically lived in the flat more than he did. I told him about the hand, how I know my mother covers her face like this in her sleep too. I said my mother and I could be exhibited in an art gallery installation. He didn&#8217;t ask about it, just let out a single sharp laugh that told me I was being far-fetched and he wouldn\u2019t entertain it. Instead, he got up to wipe off the partly dried cum from the hairy mass below his belly button. I lifted my head to get up before relaxing back down. I remembered how he liked to see me lie there for a while until he&#8217;d gotten dressed, I felt the cold tiles slowly evaporate patches of our sweat. I stared up at the ceiling and thought more about my mother and I asleep. Perhaps the artist who exhibited us would be saying something about silence both in and out of the bedroom, but I reminded myself, my body and my mother\u2019s were just sleeping and not pieces of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I wanted to ask the sleep psychiatrist about his dreams, about his body in sleep, which remained unusually still, like a car in a sales room, or a dog collapsed from heat exhaustion. I wanted to tell him how unsure I was of my own body, how it moved and changed while I lay unconscious, the hand creeping up to protect my face, to single me out as my mother\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I often lay awake until the early hours disobeying all of his rules. I collected the hair that had accumulated on the pillow before he noticed and placed them in a zip-lock bag to add to the jar later. Outside his flat there was no sound. A dumb silence rang out even with the window open to the street beneath. Nothing seemingly moved. Neither did he. His flesh was pink and blotchy in places around his upper chest, especially after he\u2019d had a few glasses of wine. His body was prickly, his chest covered in sparse hair and his face looked old as he slept. He wasn\u2019t overweight but had a small haunch of a belly forming at his age and the muscles around his shoulders, when relaxed, lay puny and depleted. This didn\u2019t compare to how well he looked upright in his suit, commanding his patients, answering the telephone. Some people are meant to always be dressed, I thought. All the while he remained so still in sleep, smelling of cigarettes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He liked to play games or what he called experiments. On date night, the sleep psychiatrist liked to hook me up to his home electroencephalogram machine, as he pinned the net of wires to my skull he recounted the same information. He said the machine shows you the four stages of sleep as a person experiences them in real time. He showed me the fibrillations of brain activity which looked to me like small and big squiggly lines, as if someone tried to write a note whilst hurtling down a hill at high speed. I told him he would be a great teacher. I imagined these hypothetical students as being not much older than myself, as each new sucker was applied to my head. He ignored this and continued saying, \u201cWe are closest to consciousness in the early stages, where the oscillations jump up and down frantically, these are called alpha waves. In this period, we can experience hypnagogic jerks, a single limb or whole-body spasm before we descend into another state.\u201d Here I made a suggestive smile to try to catch his attention but he was too involved in his experiment to notice. He was very passionate about his practice, and he said the most important aspect of any scientific experiment was the proof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One day he seemed in a particularly excitable mood and persuaded me to get into the chair again in his office. Once the machine was plugged in, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, \u201cNow, I want you to keep this on for the whole week.\u201d I must have looked startled, he continued \u201cYes, the whole week. I will bring you everything you need to sit here. You\u2019ll be my perfect patient and we must keep all of the conditions stable for a proper, rigorous experiment.\u201d He said he hoped this would lead to research that he would one day publish in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>. I didn&#8217;t so much verbally agree as remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Throughout that week I didn\u2019t move at all really. I reached out to grasp drinks but the psychiatrist usually brought them towards me and demanded I use the plastic straw he\u2019d bought specially for the job. It was pink and had obviously come from an old packet of novelty birthday straws for kids. When I needed a wee he would place a small bowl underneath my legs while I raised my body high enough to sort of crouch over it like a crow landing in its nest. When I needed to shit, that was more tricky. For this, he would allow me a commode that he\u2019d bought off the internet for a discounted fee, \u201chospital grade,\u201d he would repeat over and over as he took my daily offering to the toilet and back. I returned to my seat slowly and could hear him in the bathroom washing out the basin, whistling in between answering telephone calls to his dear patients. He was really very rigorous about the conditions. I ate when he gave me food and attempted to sleep but often the lights would go out and I\u2019d be left sitting upright in the armchair, wires silently recording my brain activity in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The worst part was that he could finally tell. In the morning he would read off the encephalograph and interpret my night. He could see how little I\u2019d slept and it angered him. These were days that were more difficult. He decided that it must be the food causing a disturbance in my nocturnal patterns, and to adjust my diet accordingly at this point, a useful and valid change to the conditions. He would often go to work and leave me for hours without much more than water until he got back in the evening. One time, I wet myself having been too frightened to move on my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The experiment went on for weeks, until finally he started coughing up blood into the sink and asked me to come over to check if what was happening was indeed real. Often it&#8217;s difficult to see what\u2019s in front of you without someone you love. He had to detach me from the wires and said he was bitterly disappointed that the experiment would now not be conclusive as he caught his breath. Indeed, there was blood in the sink and it was his. I stood there, witness to the proof running away in hot copper streams down the hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s different when you see someone dead who you knew when they were alive. Like a final uninterpretable silence so unlike sleep. We watched him go on for weeks looking frail and sickly in a hospital side room, no longer in his suit and tie but a paper-thin hospital gown that was unceremoniously hiked up by nurses doing their duties: checking for sacral sores and&nbsp; his catheter position. I watched with the ex-wife, whose name I finally learned. Her hair was thin, blonde, and perfectly done. Her neck was covered in small freckles and bigger flat moles like battleships, which she covered with a silk neckerchief I could tell from a lifetime of exposure to the sun. She was a kidney specialist he\u2019d trained with at medical school and she did exclusively private practice nowadays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His view from the window was remarkable. I didn\u2019t say this to the ex who would barely look at me, if only to point her well-polished finger in accusation. She would say how I must have pushed him over the edge, a sick young woman who never deserved him, only to break down in tears until I left. All the while the fluid in the tube that connected the psychiatrist\u2019s chest to the tub on the floor swung back and forth with each of his shallow breaths making a quiet sucking sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sickness here was so unremarkable to be part of the fabric of the room, from the oxygen tubing in his nose to his bucket on the floor, swinging to its own circadian rhythm. I kept thinking how you could see all of north London \u2014 the choppy lines of terraced houses and sharp thrusting energy of the city in the distance, and how he couldn\u2019t perceive any of it. In fact, the view was precisely wasted on the sleeping psychiatrist, so I spent most of my time preoccupied with it, giving it some deserved attention. Attention to the whole view, the thing that insomnia had taken from me. For the last few months, I could only concentrate on what was right in front of me, as if unattuned to the expansiveness of the present, instead my attention flitted like a fly up and against the windowpane battling to feel the air. Attention to the scale of the world had returned as I stared out the window mounting each propulsive hill with my gaze. Roof after roof, dislocated Victorian chimneys, hundreds of families in their terraced houses. I thought then of a memory of my mother, more precisely the image of her in sleep, light playing across her face from the dim TV screen she had dozed off in front of. I remember the argument between two characters playing out loudly in front of her body that lay unconscious to the world. I remember tiptoeing to switch it off, trying not to wake her. As the paramedics had wheeled him out into the ambulance after he had begun to cough and cough without stopping, the blood coming thick and fast, I had stayed in the apartment. I\u2019d felt the rush and commotion of the medics leaving the room. After what must have been just a few short minutes, I went over to the chair where I had been placed for so long and switched the machine off, unplugging it at the wall. There was no longer its light buzzing sound to comfort me, just a silence. I lay down in his bed, now emptied as he hurtled to the hospital intensive care unit as I would learn later, and promptly fell asleep.&nbsp; It shouldn\u2019t have been a surprise when he stopped breathing. By the time the nurse on the ward informed me he\u2019d died, I\u2019d gotten so used to seeing the sick man barely living. The finality gripped me, like a hand around the mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I became hyperaware of the body and its tricks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":16373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1367],"tags":[1489,3370],"class_list":["post-17471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fictionpoetry","tag-fiction","tag-helen-quah","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - 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Quah","date":"March 31, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"Saunders is making a performance of his imaginative jumps, of empathy itself, with an admirable enthusiasm for entertaining us.","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Review&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Review","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Saunders_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Saunders_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Saunders_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/03\/Saunders_Website.png?fit=960%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 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to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate\u2019s \u201cA Washington Irving Sketch Book\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17461\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/philip-lopate-a-washington-irving-sketch-book\/lopate_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Lopate_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Slightly askew image of a book cover of Philip Lopate's &quot;A Washington Irving Sketchbook: Reflections on an American Writer&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-17461\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17461\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/philip-lopate-a-washington-irving-sketch-book\/lopate_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Lopate_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Slightly askew image of a book cover of Philip Lopate's &quot;A Washington Irving Sketchbook: Reflections on an American Writer&quot;\" class=\"wp-image-17461\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Lopate_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Philip Lopate |<\/strong> <em>A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer<\/em> <strong>| Princeton University Press | August 2026 | 288 pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving could number Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Lord Byron among his ardent fans. The widowed Mary Shelley fell in love with him from afar and pursued him by letter. President John Tyler appointed him Minister to Spain. His door-stopper biographies of Christopher Columbus and George Washington were bestsellers. Despite the wide range\u2014and uneven quality\u2014of his subjects, his prose was universally admired. His name alone could sell books. How times have changed! These days, Irving is known for the bare fact that he was the United States\u2019 first author to make a living wholly from his pen, and for just two small stories from the first half of his career: &#8220;The Legend of Sleepy Hollow&#8221; and &#8220;Rip Van Winkle.&#8221; His biographies and histories are superseded, his hackwork is justly forgotten, and so (less justly) is his travel writing. Few would classify him as a peer of the authors who adored him.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">None of this would have surprised Irving himself. He expected his star to sink below the horizon. As Phillip Lopate puts it: \u201cIrving was always preparing himself to be forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lopate\u2019s <em>A Washington Irving Sketch Book<\/em> is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It\u2019s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving&#8217;s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving&#8217;s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don\u2019t call Phillip Lopate a \u201cminor writer\u201d in order to demean him. It\u2019s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: &#8220;I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.&#8221; And it&#8217;s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: &#8220;I didn\u2019t imagine [as a young person] being a successful \u2018minor writer.\u2019 I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it\u2019s respectable.&#8221; He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">First, a minor writer requires a minor genre. Lopate&#8217;s is the essay, and Irving\u2019s was the sketch. Lopate defines the sketch as \u201ca highly flexible, casual, almost promiscuously diaristic form of writing that would allow him excursions into memoir, vignette, rumination, fable, criticism, travel piece, and even, on occasion, fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Second, a minor writer is retiring and modest. \u201cA part of [Irving] craved invisibility,\u201d suggests Lopate. He made a habit of attributing his books to pseudonymous personae: Diedrich Knickerbocker in <em>A History of New York<\/em>, Geoffrey Crayon in <em>The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon<\/em>, Fray Antonio Agapida in <em>A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada<\/em>. This was a normal literary strategy for a familiar essayist, but Irving could carry it to a pathological extreme. Even after he was famous, he became cross with his English publisher for insisting on putting his own name (and not Agapida) on the cover of <em>Granada<\/em>. One way Irving used these personae was to let them express strong opinions of a kind he personally avoided out of tact and gallantry. Agapida&#8217;s narration of the <em>reconquista<\/em> was ethnically and religiously bigoted in a way that Irving himself was not. In person (and under his own name) Irving was kind and diplomatic.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This was not a shallow gallantry; his kindness could take remarkable forms. In 1839, for example, he stepped aside from writing a history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico so as not to overshadow the less-well-known William H. Prescott. At this time Irving was the most popular and successful author in the country, and he&#8217;d been preparing for years to write his book. It would undoubtedly have made him a lot of money. Instead, he donated his notes to the younger author. Lopate suggests this was not simply generosity. Irving nursed a persistent regret that, unlike his brothers, he had never attended college. He read widely to educate himself, but he never quite escaped the autodidact&#8217;s feeling of inferiority. Even after Sir Walter Scott virtually named him a successor, he wrote to the famous older author, &#8220;I have no command of my talents.&#8221; He made a habit of writing self-deprecating prefaces to his books, apologizing for the inadequacy of efforts for which he had every expectation of an eager audience. When he learned Prescott planned to write a book about the same subject as himself, he wrote to the younger man, &#8220;I at once felt how much more justice the subject would receive at your hands.&#8221; In short, despite his success, Irving seems to have believed his own genius was small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lopate professes to &#8220;enjoy,&#8221; &#8220;esteem,&#8221; and &#8220;admire&#8221; Irving, and in his own career he has sometimes imitated Irving&#8217;s tendencies to public modesty. For instance, his career retrospective essay collection, <em>Getting Personal<\/em> (2003), includes a preface that seems to borrow several tactics from Irving: self-deprecation and a persona. It&#8217;s introduced by a fictional editor, a \u201cDr. Horst Shovel,\u201d who claims to have found scattered notes after Lopate died (from a fictional aneurysm) and organized them into the preface. It\u2019s full of jokes at his own expense. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I was younger it seemed to me that the luckiest stroke would be if, after I died, some discerning editor or critic were to put out an anthology, choosing the best of my essays, and pointing out that, while the books as a whole do not stand up, because \u201che never learned to shape his material into an overarching structure, or to cut,\u201d nevertheless a belletristic sensibility is at work here that is \u201cinteresting,\u201d or at least characteristic of its time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is there something false in this tone? It seems ironic and uses one of Lopate&#8217;s favorite conceits\u2014the claim that he doesn&#8217;t like to edit, immediately belied by a highly wrought and self-conscious context. Lopate&#8217;s self-deprecation differs from Irving&#8217;s in that I don\u2019t believe him. For him, it&#8217;s a style, a tactic, a choice, not a courtesy, and certainly not the expression of a genuine self-doubt. Sometimes I think Lopate is pretending to be less than he is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">\u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This hunch sent me back to an earlier book by Lopate. <em>Notes on Sontag<\/em> (2009), the clear template for <em>A Washington Irving Sketch Book<\/em>. These are his only two books about other writers. The titles of both are a play on the career-launching publications of their respective subjects, \u201cNotes on Camp\u201d by Susan Sontag and <em>The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon<\/em> by Washington Irving. Lopate mentions the older publication in the newer one: \u201cin my one previous biographical work, on Susan Sontag, I was ambivalent and sometimes rather skeptical.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This understates the case. He was fundamentally critical of Sontag. She crusaded against the values of realism, naturalism, humanism, and the personal, all of which Lopate supports. She also acted as if she disdained the essay form (which Lopate loves and champions), always pivoting when asked about her own mastery of essays to discuss her novels instead. In many ways, Sontag and Lopate were philosophical enemies. They also knew each other personally. She taught at Columbia University when he studied there, and they later met in New York City as fellow writers and cinephiles. His anecdotes about their interactions are amusing at his own expense. For instance, he recounts how Sontag kept catching him leaving in the middle of movies, which gave quite the wrong impression of his seriousness. Sontag didn\u2019t admit him to her coterie of acolytes, didn\u2019t seem to respect him very much, and failed to pursue the friendship he sometimes desired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Notes on Sontag<\/em> is an excellent book <em>because<\/em> of this antipathy. She spurred him to defend the values she attacked, and he became his cranky best when writing about her. The friction gave him traction. The antagonism between author and subject tore away his veil of self-deprecation. Roused by Sontag, Lopate didn\u2019t speak of the essay as a minor genre: He made the case for its standing as major literature. He didn\u2019t fall back on the personal because of an implicit inferiority before the objective: He championed it as a source of truth. In short, Lopate\u2019s book about a writer he dislikes is far more electric and revealing than his book about a writer he admires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is clear in form as well. In <em>Notes on Sontag<\/em>, Lopate quotes Sontag liberally, working short bits of her writing into the flow of his own argument, but in <em>A Washington Irving Sketch Book<\/em>, he studs his chapters with block quotes. Some go on for more than a page. The stated function of these lengthy excerpts is to expose the reader to Irving\u2019s lovely prose. Unfortunately, to my ear, the quoted prose is often remarkably boring. I couldn\u2019t help but feel that Irving\u2019s star has faded for a reason. There\u2019s something soporific about the smoothness of this style:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The stranger who would form a correct opinion of the English character, must not confine his observations to the metropolis. He must go forth into the country; he must sojourn in villages and hamlets; he must visit castles, villas, farm-houses, cottages; he must wander through parks and gardens; along hedges and green lanes; he must loiter about country churches; attend wakes and fairs, and other rural festivals; and cope with the people in all their conditions, and all their habits and humors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s like an unobjectionable watercolor, or dinner jazz on low volume in a fancy restaurant\u2014pretty, but almost too restful and balanced and alliterative to hold the attention, especially as it burbles on, paragraph after paragraph, in an unbroken rhythm, exploiting every last sonic symmetry. No style could be more removed from the desiderata of our age, when eyeball kicks, syntactic startlements, and aphoristic punch are all in vogue. \u201cWe have moved past these Victorian expectations and require spicier seasonings,\u201d allows Lopate. Mere smoothness and prettiness won\u2019t cut it. We need lumps in our oatmeal. \u201cCan we even detect what these respondents were appreciating, or have his felicities of prose become absorbed too completely to bear noticing?\u201d Lopate\u2019s own style is more engaging to a contemporary reader than that of the man he is adulating. It is informal, colloquial, and clear, varied in rhythm and emphasis, so the book presents the odd spectacle of a more interesting writer admiring the work of a less interesting writer. It\u2019s the complete reverse of the Sontag book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The more I weigh Lopate\u2019s <em>Sontag<\/em> against Lopate\u2019s <em>Irving<\/em>, the more striking the contrast becomes, and the more perplexing. Consider, for example, the role of his favorite subject\u2014himself\u2014across these two books. Sontag\u2019s essays (with a few lovely exceptions) resisted autobiographical impulses, so Lopate strewed <em>Notes on Sontag<\/em> with personal autobiographical stories, rehearsing every last encounter the two had, as if to underscore their differences and assert the ultimate triumph of his own perspective. He also made a point to argue that the unique form of literary celebrity Sontag attained was ironically based on a personality created in the public mind by the severity and straining seriousness of her essays. She tried to be impersonal, but premised her fame on an image of herself as an imperious intellectual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Washington Irving is supposedly a model for Lopate\u2019s own work, a happy indulger of the personal. Yet in Lopate\u2019s book on Irving, there is remarkably little of Lopate. Only one early chapter, entitled \u201cAn Aside,\u201d as if it&#8217;s the garrulous indulgence of an old man, is a personal essay, and he uses it to recall a walk he took around the same parts of New York City that Irving would have known. After that, Lopate rarely shows up again, except for some brief passages at the end of the book describing his visit to Irving\u2019s house, now a museum. The book is close to a straightforward literary biography in structure, describing Irving\u2019s life in basically chronological sequence, and summarizing his books one by one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What\u2019s going on here? Why is Lopate so personal in his book about the enemy of the personal, and so impersonal in his book about the most personable of writers? Why is he so involved and invigorated when responding to the work of an enemy, and so bland and uninspired when recounting the work of a model? I confess that I wondered, contemplating this question, if Lopate is simply losing his edge at this late stage of his career. But it gets weirder. Just as Lopate\u2019s study of Sontag reveals how the intensity of her persona defeated her pretensions to impersonality, his study of Irving reveals how the man was curiously inaccessible behind his ethos of openness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Professionalism guarded Irving&#8217;s reserve. He was thrown on the resources of his pen early in life. He had to support various family members, so he never wanted to turn down a project, especially if it paid well. He overcame an early tendency to writer&#8217;s block by acquiring a steely work ethic that made him a mood-indifferent workhorse. In a chapter entitled \u201cThe Hack Writer,\u201d Lopate explains that Irving \u201clearned to work without stint and to write consistently, regardless of any blues he might be feeling.\u201d He took on strange projects if they paid enough, for instance writing <em>Astoria<\/em>, a corporate hagiography for John Jacob Astor tracing the fortunes of a fur company in the Pacific Northwest, and, on another occasion, composing a sentimental biography of a religious child poet who died young, <em>Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson<\/em>. Of this second book, Lopate writes: \u201cI see it rather as a job he undertook, like a stonemason carving a tomb: Irving was attempting to perform in yet another genre whose rules he followed consistently, for better or worse.\u201d Even Irving\u2019s private journals are curiously distant, rapidly cataloging what he saw and what the people around him did, with little commentary on his own reactions or emotional life. Even in his most intimate notations he was a writer storing up material for the marketplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lopate\u2019s admiration for this man, given the whole drift of pretty much everything else he\u2019s ever written (a gigantic orgy of appreciation for the personal), is rather odd. He even mounts a defense of impersonal hackwork: \u201cThe exigent life of a writer often requires being a hack as well as an original thinker. There is even pride in knowing one\u2019s craft so well that doing hackwork adequately can seem an achievement.\u201d Mulling these uncharacteristic remarks, I couldn\u2019t help reflecting that no matter how much Lopate claims to admire the hack, his own artistic temperament would never permit him to become one. In his extensive apologia for the personal essay, he has made a cult of self-expression, holding up authenticity of reaction as a primary moral and aesthetic canon. In fact, early in this very book Lopate describes his own inability to perform hackwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the early chapter \u201cAn Aside\u201d\u2014the only true personal essay in the collection\u2014Lopate\u2019s walk takes him past the New York Stock Exchange. There his writing veers off course to indulge a memory. Once, he tells us, he received an invitation to write \u201can essay for the annual report of the Stock Exchange.\u201d The invitation surprised him, a known leftist with no great fondness for capitalism, but he decided to give it a shot anyway, to take a swing at some good old-fashioned hackwork. It didn\u2019t go well. After wandering around the building, he found himself taking a characteristic interest in the side characters of finance, the young \u201crunners\u201d (junior employees who transmitted paper orders from phone clerks to floor brokers). He wrote his essay \u201cabout \u2018the Little People,\u2019 the workers behind the scenes at the Exchange.\u201d It was rejected. He attributed this to his inability to \u201cbecome an all-purpose hack writer, a vocation that takes a special brazenness.\u201d Then the rest of the book is about Irving, his consummate professionalism, his life as a brazen hack, which Lopate professes to admire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I left Lopate\u2019s attack on Sontag feeling subtly better-disposed toward both of them, but I left this paean to Irving with a sneaking disappointment. Given that Phillip Lopate is eighty-two years old, this might be his final book. His effort to memorialize a writer prepared to be forgotten will not be his own best claim to be remembered. \u201cThere was something sad yet heroic,\u201d he writes, \u201cabout the way Irving kept pressing on, trying to maximize his slender vein of genius in new ways.\u201d What is he actually saying here? What does this book truly add up to? I have come to see it as a careful line drawn between Lopate and his idol. Their careers have been spent in the service of different ideals. Irving achieved his popularity at the price of \u201ca special brazenness\u201d that Lopate has always refused. If they are both minor writers, that label means something different for each. Lopate has spent a career insisting that the personal is where truth lives, but here at the end of that career he has written his most impersonal book, as if unwilling to claim for himself the kind of durable relevance time has refused Irving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> the book presents the odd spectacle of a more interesting writer admiring the work of a less interesting writer. It is the complete reverse of the Sontag book<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1368],"tags":[3367,1901,2901,3366,3368],"class_list":["post-17459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-philip-lopate","tag-princeton-university-press","tag-review","tag-robert-minto","tag-washington-irving","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate\u2019s \u201cA Washington Irving Sketch Book\u201d - Cleveland Review of Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/philip-lopate-a-washington-irving-sketch-book\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate\u2019s \u201cA Washington Irving Sketch Book\u201d - Cleveland Review of Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"the book presents the odd spectacle of a more interesting writer admiring the work of a less interesting writer. 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Citing degradations from slavery to present, Coates outlined the \u201cmulti-century plunder of black people in America\u201d\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Essay&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Essay","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/essay\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Nicodemus.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1771,"url":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/2019-05-24-2019-5-24-a-new-socialism-for-the-21st-century-on-leigh-philipps-and-michal-rozworskis-the-peoples-republic-of-walmart\/","url_meta":{"origin":17459,"position":4},"title":"A New Socialism for the 21st Century: On Leigh Philipps&#8217; and Michal Rozworski&#8217;s &#8220;The People&#8217;s Republic of Walmart&#8221;","author":"Robert Minto","date":"May 24, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski | People\u2019s Republic of WalMart | Verso | March 5 2019 | 257 Pages A few months before I read The People\u2019s Republic of WalMart, I had to fill a prescription at WalMart\u2019s pharmacy. When I first dropped off the prescription, they were out of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Review&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Review","link":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/category\/review\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/41JGcj2r26L._SX329_BO12C2042C2032C200.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":14900,"url":"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/rob-mclennan-interview-katie-ebbitt\/","url_meta":{"origin":17459,"position":5},"title":"Instructional Manual for Good Writerly Practice: An Interview with rob mclennan","author":"Robert Minto","date":"December 30, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"Write one thing. 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Even Wrong: An Interview with Aaron Fagan"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17455\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/interview-with-aaron-fagan\/void-target_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"VOID TARGET_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17455\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1229%2C1536&amp;ssl=1 1229w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1638%2C2048&amp;ssl=1 1638w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1200%2C1500&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17455\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/interview-with-aaron-fagan\/void-target_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?fit=1860%2C2325&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"1860,2325\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"VOID TARGET_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17455\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1229%2C1536&amp;ssl=1 1229w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1638%2C2048&amp;ssl=1 1638w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1200%2C1500&amp;ssl=1 1200w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=1481%2C1851&amp;ssl=1 1481w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?resize=949%2C1186&amp;ssl=1 949w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/VOID-TARGET_Website.png?w=1860&amp;ssl=1 1860w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Aaron Fagan |<\/strong> <strong><em>Atom and Void<\/em><\/strong> <strong>| Princeton University Press | 2025 | 72 pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cCheeky\u201d was the word Aaron Fagan used to describe his choice of title. <em>Atom and Void<\/em> (2025), Fagan\u2019s fifth collection, published by Princeton University Press, winks at J. Robert Oppenheimer\u2019s series of essays and philosophical lectures exploring quantum theory, postcreation of the atomic bomb. Fagan and Oppenheimer are now press-mates, their collections christened with the same name. They also share an attempt to make sense of history\u2019s long past and long future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Atom and Void<\/em> consists of 55 sonnets that echo back and forth to one another. While the entire collection is interlinked, poems sharing a page spread read as mirror images. Each poem, in its own way, attempts to understand the fallacy of clarity, where consciousness exists between the atom and the void. It\u2019s a haunting collection, at times yearning. The voice of the book feels unsettled, which makes sense given the sonnets\u2019 delving into the nature of reality, meaning-making at large, and perception. There is immediacy and meditation in Fagan\u2019s poems, a perspective shift between the myopic and the massive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The collection is universal in the sense that attempting to understand the illusion of clarity is a ubiquitous (albeit poetic) problem, but Fagan has a curiosity and moodiness that make the poems feel deeply personal\u2014an opportunity to peer into the confines of another\u2019s perception, maybe even psyche. Jung\u2019s influence breathes throughout the poems, specifically in \u201cEveryone a Parsifal,\u201d \u201cPepper\u2019s Ghost,\u201d and \u201cAnamorphosis.\u201d In \u201cAnamnesis:\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To Say there is no explanation for this is not<br>An understatement, it is the only explanation.<br>Put another way: I am the only person to never<br>Have a mystical experience and remain sane.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I have long admired Fagan for his seriousness of thought and pure beauty of his work. And we have long been internet friends, but in spite of that familiarity, sitting down with him to discuss <em>Atom and Void<\/em> left me feeling excitable, charged, combustible even. This is the power of great poetry and great poets\u2014not necessarily the clarity their work provides, but the solidarity felt in knowing those ambient questions we hold are being asked by the type of people we want asking them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Katie Ebbitt:<\/strong> I kept wondering if you were an atheist as I read <em>Atom and Void,<\/em> or if you have a religious perspective. Or was this book a philosophical exercise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Aaron Fagan:<\/strong> It\u2019s definitely not a philosophical exercise. To put it succinctly, I\u2019ve been sober for 22 years now. In recovery culture, they talk about a higher power of your own understanding or God. I took that charge to heart. So much of my life has been monopolized by culturally received ideas of what God is or would be. I have no patience for any of those. Yet, when you take to heart the idea that it\u2019s a higher power of your own understanding, not a higher power of other people\u2019s understanding, and when I began to investigate again, as placeholders, questions of spirituality, I started opening myself up to actions that were in greater alignment with my own heartfelt intentions, not passively received morality, rather living a life that is actually aligned with how I want to be in the world and how I see being in the world as important. Not something that\u2019s rigidly dogmatic from without, but something that\u2019s rigidly dogmatic from within.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If I want to suffer less in the world, but there are certain nonnegotiables. This is all more or less Buddhism. Old age, sickness, and death are kinds of nonnegotiable forms of suffering. And this control impulse in me, which lots of other people share, is wanting the present moment to be different from the way it is. Whether that\u2019s seeking drugs and alcohol to change the way I feel about living this moment or to try to shed all of my old identities, my old ideas about who I am and how the world is organized and come to the present moment as it\u2019s unfolding in this unwritten way, not narrating everything\u2014to just be present with it as it is unadorned with all of my storytelling. Reality starts to reveal itself in a totally new way, stripped of all that storytelling, and what emerges starts to look like grace. And that\u2019s not to say that all the pain and heartbreak and bewilderment and confusion aren\u2019t still there. You\u2019re able to be with it in a different way.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My interest in spiritual questions has been more like a life-or-death pursuit. It\u2019s not something out of armchair philosophical playing in the sandbox and seeing how ideas go together. I find that anytime my ego or psyche collapses around an idea of God, an idea of spirituality, that\u2019s the moment that I already begin suffering over my conception of whatever it is. I find that it\u2019s that way when I try to define who I am, who God is, what poetry is. Anytime I try to come up with some sort of definition, something that isn\u2019t a living, breathing thing, just merely an iteration of an idea, not a final idea on something, it immediately becomes something to suffer over. Reification, the making of an abstract concept, making it concrete, that to me is how the mind relates to nouns and how the world is organized in these concepts. <strong><\/strong>It will arrive at concrete concepts and judgments about the world with things that are ultimately abstract. <strong><\/strong>I\u2019m more interested in the dynamic, the active, the on-goingness. There is no arrival. All arrivals are departures. <strong><\/strong>To just be constantly washed out to sea by everything. I lived most of my life feeling like everybody has the instruction manual, walking around like they have the answers. I felt like I was supposed to know who I am. And now nothing\u2019s changed. But rather than that being a source of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, et cetera, now it\u2019s like the ultimate wellspring of joy for me: not knowing who I am.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> This morning, I was reviewing my notes on <em>Atom and Void<\/em>. Afterward, I walked through a graveyard. I am constantly asking myself why I am feeling what I am feeling because it\u2019s generally not pleasant. There is so much suffering in this ongoing struggle to locate myself within my own emotions. One of the things within Buddhism that I both love and struggle with is the Wheel of Life and the varying realms that we go through. I find myself too much of a hungry ghost. I am taking fragments from the poem \u201cParousia,\u201d but you write: \u201cmy body is my body of work\u2026 \/entropy continues to impose fundamental limits\/ On communication\u2026\/ one molecule in the brain decides a good memory or bad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> Yeah. Gosh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> I am sorry, it\u2019s not really a question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> I\u2019m appreciating how you\u2019re engaging with it. I\u2019m unapologetically a cafeteria-style person when it comes to spiritual concepts. I go with what works in the actual world as an applied principle. What passes for spiritual practice is a cargo cult. There are these empty procedures and the theater of these things that have become wildly decoupled from their sources and the real meaning, cultural memory, and importance of them. There\u2019s a lot about Buddhism that\u2019s awful; there\u2019s a lot about all organized religion that is awful for all the obvious reasons, but I\u2019m not as prepared as I used to be to throw it all out, because underneath all of that, there is something essential that is valuable to actual living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At the end of my drinking, I was a danger to myself and other people. I was running the risk of being institutionalized. It dawned on me, by not asking for help from other human beings, I\u2019m a danger to myself and other people, but when I do reach out for help and when I\u2019m of service to other people and I align myself with this loose grouping of moral and spiritual principles, I find that not only am I not a danger to myself and other people, I can be a source of healing in the world. The darkest things of my past turn out to be solid gold in the context of recovery. I can literally help save the lives of other people with the stuff that I was going to take to my grave. I go with what works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> <strong><em><\/em><\/strong><em>Atom and Void<\/em> is famously a series of essays by Oppenheimer. These essays are focused on understanding fallacy and how the assumption of understanding can bring about destruction. The Picabia epigraph at the beginning of your book relates to this: \u201cknowledge is an old error remembering its youth.\u201d I didn\u2019t completely understand the meaning at first, which felt so obvious after finishing your <em>Atom and Void<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> There is something very riddle-like in its construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> Was the reference to Oppenheimer intentional?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> Yes. That\u2019s my favorite of his books, not that he wrote a lot of books. I had had a different title for the collection, but I had written this poem, <em>Atom and Void<\/em>. I just found it kind of cheeky that the book had been accepted by Princeton and they\u2019re the ones who published those essays. I had always had this interest in physics and there\u2019s a&nbsp; sort of tortured line of logic that I have about where physics and language interact and a kind of quantum poetics, so to speak, that is just too tedious to even bother uttering out loud. If anybody gleans anything from it, that\u2019s for them to discover, but having elaborate theories of language and poetics, I think can be horribly pretentious. I try not to be that way, but it would be dishonest for me to say that those kinds of things aren\u2019t interesting to me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You picked up on the heart\u2019s core of what I love about the Oppenheimer collection about the fallacies. In a way it relates to that idea of the cargo cult too, that there are these received understandings of things. It\u2019s hilarious because there\u2019s a phrase in mathematics called <em>not even wrong.<\/em> It\u2019s a term for pseudoscience, that there are things that get passed off in the culture, so this could be something that\u2019s about history, it could be something about poetry or language. One of the famous examples is the Robert Frost poem, \u201cThe Road Not Taken.\u201d There are all these things that live as cultural artifacts, but what people interpret them to mean is literally the opposite of what the poem\u2019s argument is. They are not even wrong because they\u2019re so foundationally incorrect that it doesn\u2019t even dignify being called wrong, the foundations of it are so flawed as to not even be worth entertaining. I think that principle can be applied to a lot of what passes for any number of things particularly in contemporary culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> Do you want to say what those any number of things are?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> It\u2019s all translation, everything is lost in translation. You look at the way poetry and education and language and literature were when I was coming up, we were reading the exact same novels that my parents read when they were in public school. There\u2019s the primacy of the novel, but was that because fiction is a superior art form or is it because trade publishers had relationships with schools? A novel is more paper and more ink and requires more man-hours to edit into something that can be sold, so you double the marketing budget for the novel so you get a return on investment and then you get a relationship with the public schools. Is the reason that the novel is so dominant in American culture about its aesthetic superiority or is it something that is purely a mechanical function of capitalism and how it\u2019s produced as a physical object and put into the world? That feels like a legitimate question to me. It\u2019s not an engineering problem.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Education is broken down into this system of measures. It\u2019s quantified, quantifiable, it\u2019s not qualitative; everything is results driven, statistically driven. These are the motivators behind things. This is how value is arrived at: treating the human heart, the human experience as an engineering problem. There are things where concepts of industrialization and engineering concepts are applied to things to which they have no business being. It\u2019s not even wrong! The purpose of studying the humanities in college was never to become a poet. It was never to think that you were going to pursue that from a career perspective. That was never the point of studying those things. It was about creating well-rounded people that would go into the world with a poet\u2019s soul building a bridge, so that you\u2019d bring truth and beauty into bridge building. But we get these identical McDonald\u2019s that are shipped in trucks and put together like Lincoln Logs. What you look around at in the world is this soul crushing display of mediocrity. Products are engineered to fail, so that people consume more of them.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On the one hand people are talking about sustainability, but whatever gains are made in that are multiplied a million times over in waste, in exporting our environmental disasters to other countries, and then along comes AI and whatever efficiencies were built; one data center uses more electricity that is reliant in some way, shape, or form on fossil fuels than most countries. So what are we even doing anymore? And then, on top of all that, you have the whole branch of climate science that treats the atmosphere and the world as an engineering problem, as if it\u2019s a closed system in the way that an engineering system like an engine or a motor is a truly closed system. It\u2019s sealed off from outside influences. That is not the case with nature. Nature adapts. There are myriad forces that are completely unaccountable for how nature finds its own homeostasis, and the degree to which human beings can influence that in a large-scale way is largely negligible. When you look at the macro trends of how nature adapts over time and is unfolding in a way that we don\u2019t know anything about, and in all likelihood, it doesn\u2019t include us. So there\u2019s this deeply selfish, self-centered worldview.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even the Big Bang is really sort of a romantic story of cell division, you know, that we need for there to be a beginning of the universe in the way that there was a beginning for me. The one cell, the wholeness of the one thing broke into two, and then off you go. And the universe is expanding infinitely. And time is subsequently explained.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> And then what if there is no time?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Everything is ever-present, always has been, and always will be falling in and out of form indefinitely. Under those conditions, time collapses. Time is only relative to the point of view of the observer, the subjective observer, the human being who dies. But what we think of as death is largely sentimental.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> This goes back to your second epigraph in <em>Atom and Void<\/em>, \u201csentimentality is a form of fatigue,\u201d from Leonora Carrington.<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> Illusion and distorted images are thematic throughout <em>Atom and Void<\/em>. Do you feel that poems get you closer to clarity, if this is something you even want?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> The poems are an attempt to harmonize with something. There\u2019s all these modulations of the actual language that are presented in this tidy little way, but inside, it\u2019s sort of pure chaos within the container. And there are different voices traveling through the poems, different registers of sonic texture, the texture of the ideas, the textures of meaning are moving along in an orderly way, or in a chaotic way, crashing around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> You have references to Jung\u2019s Parsifal, too. I was wondering about your feelings on the subconscious or the unconscious\u2014about their existence.<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> I\u2019ve experienced the process of unleashing it and unearthing subconsciousness. The twelve steps are basically like a recipe for confronting the unconscious and bringing it out into the light. The old timers in recovery will say that you\u2019re only as sick as your secrets. And there are all these things that I drank down, buried, and tried to hide or ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And when I put alcohol down, I had all these other choices that I could be making. So I didn\u2019t have to think about drinking. I was making the infinite number of other choices that I had available to me by making the one choice to stay away from that. It\u2019s embarrassingly simple. You can\u2019t get drunk if you don\u2019t drink. Which sounds like rocket science to an alcoholic.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> I think one of the weird things about being a human is the fact that we are just so infinitely complicated and also so impossibly simple and it\u2019s strange living within that dialectic. Did poetry lead to your sobriety?<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> I had a friend that I got sober with at Syracuse and we used to talk about relating that to poetry, that poetry aspires to the condition of prayer. I don\u2019t know how much I still subscribe to that idea so much, but I think that there is some truth to that. Writing poetry for me is kind of a sandbox to explore this relationship with a higher power, whatever that is. My conception is no conception. I don\u2019t write poems to reinforce my philosophies. I do it to shed them or incinerate them and see what\u2019s left on the other side. Whatever is essential that\u2019s left behind might be something worthwhile, worthy of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>KE:<\/strong> One of the hardest things I think about writing for me, as I write almost exclusively poetry, is I feel poetry really is about a distillation. I think what\u2019s so beautiful about <em>Atom and Void<\/em> is that there is this repetition or echo that exists throughout the book that meditates on itself. I struggle with my own relevancy when I write, that my scope of thought is too contained, boring.<strong>&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AF:<\/strong> I think that there\u2019s a use and a place for boredom. You know, it\u2019s like the John Berryman line, <em>life, friends, is boring<\/em>. There\u2019s a lot that happens in modern life that is bone-crushingly boring and unproductive. And that is a feature, not a bug. I go out to my vehicle, I turn on the vehicle, I back out almost in the exact same way. I go down the same streets, look at the same street signs. But, like in the poem, each time they\u2019re reintroduced, they\u2019re not the same. That part can start to be explored, that there really is no such thing as repetition, that there really is no such thing as something being the same.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And this points back to what I was talking about with the engineering problem thing too. I work for this gear engineering magazine and an engineer will draw a gear with its perfect dimensions. But for each thing that is machined by the machine, every dimension of the object has to be assigned a tolerance, which is a plus or minus one or two microns, which would literally make a piece of hair seem gigantic. It has to be so near perfect, but no gear that is manufactured because of the temperature of the tooling, the temperature of the oil splashing onto it, the cutting tool, the speed with which it\u2019s cutting through the steel, no two are ever going to be the same. That\u2019s why there are tolerances. There\u2019s no such thing as a perfect gear. There are no circles in nature. There\u2019s always some degree of distortion in everything. There\u2019s nothing that is the Platonic ideal of what it is in the physical world. Nothing\u2019s round, there are no perfect triangles. And&nbsp; that\u2019s just where geometry is concerned. So then you get into concepts of love and truth and beauty and things explode into even deeper subjectivities. So there, there, there is no repetition.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are general frameworks that can be abided by in some way. It\u2019s easy to walk through the world as if there\u2019s some kind of certainty that can be obtained. In my experience there\u2019s nothing more delusional and harmful than that. But it seems that\u2019s the thing that we really suffer from the most. Why don\u2019t you agree with me that this is beautiful? Why don\u2019t you agree with me that this is truthful? Why would I?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is no arrival. All arrivals are departures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1416],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview","pmpro-level-required","pmpro-level-1","pmpro-level-2","pmpro-level-3","pmpro-level-4","pmpro-level-5","pmpro-level-8","pmpro-level-6","pmpro-level-9","pmpro-level-7","pmpro-level-10","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Not Even Wrong: An Interview with Aaron Fagan - Cleveland Review of Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/interview-with-aaron-fagan\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Not Even Wrong: An Interview with Aaron Fagan - Cleveland Review of Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There is no arrival. 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&#8220;Gabor&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17437\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/from-gabor\/hedayati_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Hedayati_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17437\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><noscript><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" data-attachment-id=\"17437\" data-permalink=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/from-gabor\/hedayati_website\/\" data-orig-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?fit=900%2C1125&amp;ssl=1\" data-orig-size=\"900,1125\" data-comments-opened=\"1\" data-image-meta=\"{&quot;aperture&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;credit&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;camera&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;caption&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;created_timestamp&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;copyright&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;focal_length&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;iso&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;shutter_speed&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;title&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;orientation&quot;:&quot;0&quot;,&quot;alt&quot;:&quot;&quot;}\" data-image-title=\"Hedayati_Website\" data-image-description=\"\" data-image-caption=\"\" data-large-file=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?fit=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-17437\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=819%2C1024&amp;ssl=1 819w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=240%2C300&amp;ssl=1 240w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=768%2C960&amp;ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=374%2C468&amp;ssl=1 374w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=851%2C1064&amp;ssl=1 851w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?resize=390%2C488&amp;ssl=1 390w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clereviewofbooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Hedayati_Website.png?w=900&amp;ssl=1 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/noscript><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><strong>Seyed Qader Hedayati | Chiya Parvizpur (translator), Hourieh Maleki Qouzloo (translator) | Henar Press |<\/strong> <em>Gabor<\/em> <strong>| August 25, 2026 | 254 Pages<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The outpost wasn\u2019t around back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Growing up, my old man liked selling veal more than beef. According to him, it sold better cause the calves were young and tender. I had to drag myself out of bed at dawn to help him herd them to the slaughterhouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He always said a stick was no good cause it\u2019d bruise their legs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Honestly, I figured a whack was easier than a tail squeeze. Touching their tails made them jumpy and a squeeze had them leaping like psychos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some calves refused to budge no matter the yelling or whacking. Sometimes their legs went stiff, other times they\u2019d collapse. Some would start jumping the second I touched them, snapping their tails in the process. Now and then, a stubborn calf went nuts the first time its tail bent and my old man would lose the halter. It\u2019d take off like a lunatic and we\u2019d get teased and laughed at for chasing it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The gunmen played football in the big yard during the evenings. You could hear the cheers and hand-stitched ball thumping and thwacking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sometimes the ball bounced out of the yard and folks kicked it back, terrified of the gunmen. Nobody wanted to be there when they came to retrieve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When the gunmen played, they\u2019d ignore the game and hang by the outpost whispering something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Karim\u2019s in charge now. While the gunmen were busy playing, we all went our separate ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Karim used hand signals to tell us what to do and where to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once, they kicked the ball so high it landed by Abdol Mtalib and bounced past the outpost. After a few bounces, he picked it up. But the gunmen in the trenches saw him grab it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Abdol Mtalib held onto the ball for a minute, looking at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They started yelling in Persian from their trenches telling us to kick the ball back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You were terrified how the plan would unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You walked towards Abdol Mtalib and told him to slowly put it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You wanted to kick it back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Didn\u2019t I tell you to put it down?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Don\u2019t kick it back. Seriously.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I put it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Soon as you did, you whistled to Azad, <em>C\u2019mon, let\u2019s go.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Three of us bolted and snuck into an alley, and we didn\u2019t kick the ball back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We were a real pain in their ass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Yeah, right. Let them get it back themselves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I kept my mouth shut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, that became our nightly routine. We\u2019d hang around and if the ball came over a few times, we wouldn\u2019t kick it back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We\u2019d take off laughing as we watched them scramble for their ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Yeah, exactly. We weren\u2019t their errand boys, kicking back their balls.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Azad and I burst out laughing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once, those guys kicked their ball so high it sailed right over the alley and landed somewhere they couldn\u2019t see from the trenches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I ran and looked around. No one in sight. Didn\u2019t even think about Abdol Mtalib or Azad. I snatched the ball and sprinted to our basement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Azad and I chased after him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We wrapped it in a white burlap sack and jammed it into an old barrel stuffed with tattered cloth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Karim brought some cardboard boxes and we threw them on top. Then the three of us took off. As we headed out\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A gunman arrived, rifle in hand, finger resting on the trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another gunman arrived, rifle in hand, finger resting on the trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another gunman also arrived, rifle in hand, finger resting on the trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another other gunman arrived, rifle in hand, finger resting on the trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Another other gunman also arrived, rifle in hand, finger resting on the trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The street gunman, the alley gunman, the inside gunman, the outside gunman, the ground floor gunman, the basement gunman, the rooftop gunman, the yard gunman, the door gunman, the window gunman, the tree gunman, the wall gunman, the upside gunman, the downside gunman, the behind gunman, the ahead gunman, the gunman on the right, the gunman on the left, the straight gunman, the down gunman, the deep gunman, the top gunman, the low gunman, the near gunman, the corner gunman, the this-side gunman, the that-side gunman, the beside-that gunman gunman, the beside-this gunman gunman, the near-the-gunman gunman, the down-the-gunman gunman, the behind-the-gunman gunman, the gunman near the gunman, the gunman down the gunman, the gunman behind the gunman, the gunman ahead of the gunman, the gunman after the gunman\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>That\u2019s how our homeland ended up overrun with gunmen. We were scared shitless and fled.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We crossed the street and headed to the bazaar to avoid drawing attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Listen, Azad. Keep your mouth when we get home, OK?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Don\u2019t worry, I won\u2019t say a word<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Me neither<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Karim trusted me, but he was more concerned about Azad keeping the secret. He always said Azad had a loose tongue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I swear, if we talk, they\u2019ll kill us<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>What if they start investigating and find out?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Nobody\u2019s gonna find out as long as you and Abdul keep your mouths shut<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I\u2019m telling you, if they find that ball we\u2019ll get locked up. My old man said they\u2019ve got a shady prison setup inside there.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When they summoned my old man and the others at the roundabout, he said they blindfolded us and took us somewhere dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My old man said they took him down over twenty steps and when he opened his eyes, he saw his neighbors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My old man said we were all wondering why they brought us here in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we got back around twilight, we found out the gunmen had searched every inch of the neighborhood and questioned everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But they didn\u2019t find what they were after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They even found the barrel, removed the cardboard boxes and all the stuff on top but somehow they missed the burlap sack as if God had blinded them. I\u2019m not making this up, I swear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next day, the neighborhood was summoned to the outpost. As people returned, their faces were etched with terror. Three of them had been taken and locked up. They said, <em>We won\u2019t let them go unless you bring the ball back. You\u2019ve got two days to find it. If you don\u2019t, we\u2019ll bomb you. It\u2019s halal if we kill you since you\u2019re the enemy. And wiping you out would be as easy as taking a sip of water.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the prisoners was Azad\u2019s dad. Azad was absolutely terrified. The news swept through the whole neighborhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I knew from the start that the plan was doomed but I didn\u2019t dare say anything to Abdol Mtalib. He\u2019d call me a pussy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People started searching the houses on their own, begging anyone who had the ball to return it. They were terrified of getting bombed at midnight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">People searched every inch of empty land, ruined buildings, and every corner of each yard, floor, and basement in the neighborhood. But the ball had vanished into thin air, like a drop of water dissolving into the earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That night, the neighborhood elders got together. After they were sure the ball was gone, they pooled their money and decided to buy a new one for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They hoped the gunmen would spare them from the bombing, and release the prisoners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We had no idea what they\u2019d decided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next day we found ourselves huddling together at school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Azad and Karim were bickering nonstop. Azad was convinced it was Karim\u2019s fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>That stupid idea was all yours. I knew from the start it was doomed to fail.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Cut the crap, what\u2019s done is done. Stop fighting already.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>C\u2019mon, Azad, if you knew it wasn\u2019t gonna work, why did you go along with it?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>It\u2019s on you. Now my old man\u2019s the one locked up, not yours.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>How was I supposed to know things would end up like this? You were all for it too.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I don\u2019t know about that. I\u2019m gonna tell them this afternoon that Karim\u2019s been hiding it at his place. Let them arrest your old man and see how you like it, OK?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>You\u2019re not gonna cry about it like a girl, are you? Wait and see what happens this afternoon. I know what\u2019s going on, and I\u2019ve got the guts to see it through. If they\u2019re out by then, I\u2019ll smuggle the ball back into their yard.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Abdol Mtalib, you\u2019re my witness. I\u2019ve warned him. If he doesn\u2019t get that ball back to the outpost, I\u2019m gonna make some noise.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Something felt off when we went home at noon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Sunni clergyman, Kak Bayez the Chicken Seller, and Kak Ahmad Hasari took a new ball to the outpost out of fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">They approached the soldiers, all nervous and polite, saying, <em>Here, sir, we\u2019ve brought a new ball. Please, release the prisoners.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was holding the ball when this skinny soldier with a scraggly beard yanked it from me so hard it almost pulled my shoulder out of its socket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He yelled, <em>One, two, three, now get out of here! So you think you can steal from us? Get lost and don\u2019t come back!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we tried to plead for the prisoners, they began firing at us. We had no choice but to run off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nobody knew what was going on. We were all fleeing. The Sunni clergyman\u2019s turban flew off. We were too scared to look back. I have no idea how he managed to grab his turban and catch up with us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Everyone in the neighborhood was worried about those who\u2019d been arrested.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The community felt defeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Spilled the beans at home?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>I didn\u2019t have the guts, but if he doesn\u2019t take it back, I will. Just think about how that creep got us into this whole mess. I\u2019m getting a little impatient. Let\u2019s go tell him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We headed to Karim\u2019s place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We spotted three people from a distance rushing towards us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Azad spotted his old man and went over to say hi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Azad spotted his dad and approached him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The prisoners were released and the whole neighborhood breathed a sigh of relief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But we were stuck with this ball and had no idea what to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whether it was because of the community or outpost, we couldn\u2019t work up the courage to start playing with the ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We used to dream about getting a plastic ball, and now we had a real, genuine hand-stitched football. But we were too scared to even show it off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The ball had become a snake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\">You said<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The ball had become a poisonous snake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We used to dream about getting a plastic ball, and now we had a real, genuine hand-stitched football. But we were too scared to even show it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":259091335,"featured_media":17437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1381],"tags":[3360,2891,1489,3363,3362,3361,3359,1497],"class_list":["post-17423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-excerpt","tag-chiya-parvizpur","tag-excerpt","tag-fiction","tag-gabor","tag-henar-press","tag-hourieh-maleki-qouzloo","tag-seyed-qader-hedayati","tag-translation","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>from &quot;Gabor&quot; - Cleveland Review of Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/clereviewofbooks.com\/from-gabor\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"from &quot;Gabor&quot; - Cleveland Review of Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"We used to dream about getting a plastic ball, and now we had a real, genuine hand-stitched football. 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