A Way of Loving Time: The Year in Wavy Lines


In 2023 we published 120 reviews, essays, interviews, and experiments in critical writing on this website. Each time we posted a new piece we selected one line, phrase, or fragment to represent it, scrolling by in the wavy line on our homepage. We collected them throughout the year, compiling a document lovingly referred to as the “wavy lines inventory.” At this year’s end, we present its distillation or digital imprint: every wavy line from our homepage arranged in chronological order, a kind of cento, list, monument, calendar.


A Way of Loving Time: The Year in Wavy Lines

poetry is a way of loving time

attend, as it were, to attention itself

what to do when the water recedes

it is not just who I am with, but also who I am reading, that (re)shapes me in perpetuity

all study means is love

repetition is not repetition per se

competitive wage rates, profit margins, and outsourcing

a sex scandal is just another tedious shuffle of paperwork

the single heart weighs almost nothing, and everything

once the fucking stops, everything falls apart

no answers, no points, no prize money

in the abused copy of the Kafka letters

where is the Midwest? 

because it’s not like Stanford uses all their thousands of fucking acres

as familiar love recedes untouchably

fundamental identification with the animal

flat design’s incursion into the literary realm

playground basketball’s the common denominator

ambling through Vermont giving passersby his howdy

there’s no way to know if you’re making the right choice

play the game or wear the gown

converting their Grand Rapids “ruff” to “roof”

less frightened by the prospect of an isolated winter than of a reckless spring

we remain meaning-making machines

pretty metal, but also suggests barbecue

the opening, the rupture, what might be brought into existence through tears in the fabric

we get James Joyce on a boat

not a demystification but a mystification, a séance

girls just have bad tummies

she decides not to attend her father’s funeral

as it turned out, I lived

to dream is to know

the girlfriends are “leaning in” to not working

we learned about one another through the ways we read

watching can also be an act of scorn

too often explained and too little understood

in a rock and a hard place

sexualized, but not sinful

pointing to… signifying… something…

to embrace contingency as opposed to closure

the book’s intentions, or anti-intentions

in one case, the drawing conveys knowledge; in the other, it deconstructs it

it is a dance from beginning to end

when the mind is open to sideways time

modern world predicated on the relative climatic stability of the Holocene

ham cubes and cheese-wiz

to negotiate the sum of weight

how we rebuild imaginary palaces, vast and tenuous estates of maybe

in the middle of the ring with nobody to fake-fight

good, if hardly the same good 

home is where the zone is

​​slim, ironic, plot-averse

unreliable narrators, angled mirrors, filtered photos

all languages develop idiosyncratic images

the toddlers are playing airport again

shame is a practice, guilt a craft

​​a hope that feels absurd, almost playful

following the chimera out of the dead soil of the human

it feels good to smash things

Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good movie, by the way

trying, once again, to write

this shift: how momentous

who gives a shit about world-building, right?

an excruciatingly cumbersome mental exercise

not the fruits of a palatable truth

keep crate-digging, stay ostentatious, don’t apologize

fudged just enough to become semi-intelligible

the kangaroo courts of Twitter

the worst of all possible worlds is also the best

I extended my drawl, bought a punch bowl

are they good jobs?

the fickleness of solidarity

it’s the “underfacts,” the undercurrents, that are more interesting

the technology of poetry to make immediacy happen

to sneer is to survive

a supernatural element to this quest to learn more about her

the egg of zero in an orderless invisible gasland

maybe if I stand straight like an angel it will come to me

they would rather cut onions for soup

what life must be like in Manhattan, Kansas

craft breweries gestate with exploding meth labs

no aim, only ambition; no object, only a subject; no super-ego, only pure id

why shouldn’t we ask for more?

the hoeing techniques I developed doubled my team’s efficiency

yeti lover!

the idiots will inherit the world

bad books deserve this

the overlap of disgust and pleasure

I am no longer interested in talking to people who, structurally, cannot hear me

in quatrains ++ couplets ++ in heat

the “insider” poet, the academic or MFA student

to understand the history of waste is to understand the history of the world

the inevitable future had not arrived quite yet

a woman alone is an emergency, being poor is another emergency

nonfiction promises reality and truth, a mask for the writer and her investments

corporate logic might optimize the game into something truly unwatchable

I was here

two geographical-cultural poles: the urban and the rural

but we are “here,” as offshore debris nevertheless

no pattern holds forever, it breaks to hold you better 

she belongs to a country that wants to kill her

the pearl is anti-myth

disaffected housewife turned cultural critic

the It Girl to end them all

UUUHH! UUUHH! King! King! King! King! King! King!

a narrative that progresses forward, after all, relies on a past to leave behind

I hold the udder and squeeze, it’s my udder

what a more positive, holistic, sustainable conception of security would look like

not “rum” or “aguardiente” but “hooch”; not “fortunate” but “lucky-duck”; not “witless” or “foolish” but “a big dummy”

salvaging a devastated ecosystem

repetitions that change by staying the same in a new context

that’s not a big enough god for me

nothingness—the mute fact of being

language is the dreamscape, and she must weather the hellscape to reach it

the act of looking can never be separated from the body that does the seeing

“meat jewelry,” “gastro-esthetics,” and “hors-textes”

the world that has fucked you into oblivion can be fucked in turn

get back on that horse

Previous
Previous

The Precarious “North” of Jacques Darras

Next
Next

Quarter in Review: Three Horse Girls, Two Horses, One “Vol. 01”