These are the books I read in 2023—

The Nature Book by Tom Comitta

I interviewed Tom for BOMB and was sad to scrap these supercut questions I found in interviews with authors in the tradition of citational fiction:

• Are you ready to risk the fate of the centipede, who, when asked exactly how he crawled, shot himself? (Thomas Frick to J.G. Ballard, The Paris Review)
• A humanist vision considers history to be a human product, which is to say, a product of the freedom of its individuals and the diverse groups that have enacted it and interpreted it. An anti-humanist vision asserts that, on the contrary, those individuals and groups are the result of history itself, and their freedom is an illusion. If you allow me to limit the choices artificially within this possible spectrum, where do you situate yourself in it? (Jorge Mafjud to Eduardo Galeano, MR Online)
• What do you believe in? (William Burroughs, High Times)
• Do you regularly abstain from any of the following: a.) Red meat b.) Sugar c.) Boiled vegetables d.) Pizza e.) Hard Liquor f.) Coffee g.) Herbal tea h.) Black bean sauce i.) Shellfish j.) Potatoes k.) Chef salad l.) Hot sauce (Mark Magill to Kathy Acker, BOMB Magazine)
• I’m ruining everything, aren’t I? (Ryan McIlvain to Jonathan Lethem, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Flagged and Removed by Darcie Wilder

This wasn’t as compelling or cohesive as Literally Show Me a Healthy Person, but I enjoyed the accumulation and feeling of freedom. It made me think I should be compiling my tweets, or withholding my better ideas, saving them in a doc instead of posting. The thought dwindled quickly, though, and I haven’t changed my behavior. It’s ok because they don’t really publish books like this anymore.

orz by Troy James Weaver

Troy’s a master. These varied little guys are so fun and good. I feel sorry for the 8-billion-minus-50 people in the world who will not get to own this book.

Forever Imperfect (Forever Magazine Pocket Bible 3)

I guess I just read some hip kids’ new years resolutions, maybe? Good luck partying less, I guess. I hope you make some meaningful human connections in the year to come.

Picture Window by Danny Caine

I heard Danny say on the Autofocus pod that my 🖐 poems on HAD prompted some joke-poem riffs that made their way into this book. Ego sufficiently stoked, I picked up a copy! Danny is the preeminent dad-poet. I also admire his clear-eyed principles. These domestic gems made me feel guilty for slacking on being more creative with my own diaristic impulses.

VIO-LETS by EJ Kneifel

These prose poems are just right. There’s noticing, there’s action, there’s nature, there’s tenderness. There’s a line from a Florist song. I feel curiously warm toward EJ.

A Heart So White by Javier Marías

Ok here’s the point at which I’m now looking back a year ago (on Feb ’23 from March ’24), italicizing this list of book titles, formatting them to have “header” styles, remembering almost nothing about several of the entries that follow. Not so for this book! I can’t remember how I came to this one. I’ve seen small pockets of enthusiasm for the book break out online, but there had to’ve been a distinct moment that spurred me into action. It can’t just have appeared on my Kindle, but that’s where I found it. In a short-lived group DM with Aaron Burch and Josh Hebburn about Evan Williams’ “Ted,” I brought up this book. Aaron said that he taught it in a class, and told his students “I have NO IDEA what the fuck this piece is about. What it “means,’ what it’s trying to do…” — at which point I think they were all relieved to hear me say that, maybe afraid that they hadn’t “got it” — “… but I never doubt the piece itself knows what it is, and every sentence surprises and excites me, and I just… idk, I just love it!” And Josh called it “the paradigmatic HAD story.” And I agreed. But then, by contrast, I said, “I’ve been really vibing with the loose, excessive, rambly kind of prose in novels, lately. It’s no less attentive to language, but it’s much harder to pick a sentence and say: “look! great!” I’ve been drawn to more throwaway stuff that still adds intangible texture Specifically, “A Heart So White” by Javier Marías! It’s blowing my mind. It tries my patience at times, but always rewardingly so.” This book is about translation and misunderstanding and tension and it’s one of the most memorable things I’ve read in years.

Do Every Thing Wrong!!: XXXTentacion Against the World by Jarett Kobek

Got really into XXX because I was watching every single dumb doc I could find streaming as a visuals-optional kind of background noise to lifting my little weights after putting my kid to bed, and “Look at Me” on Netflix was a standout. It’s unfair to compare the experience of reading the book to the movie, but I kinda can’t help it. The subject’s magnetism doesn’t quite come across the same way on the page. The text does capture more of the nuance of the internet’s role in the story, and it obviously has a very compellingly stylized voice of its own. I don’t know anything about Kobek, but feel like I should.

Year of the Buffalo by Aaron Burch

*Vince McMahon meme GIF* Aaron Burch writing about a former wrestler whose likeness is being made into a videogame 😏 Aaron Burch writing about distant brothers on a road trip 😮 Aaron Burch writing an inexplicable and little-resolved indoor/outdoor pet buffalo side plot 🤩

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai

I met Sam Bett, who translated this, when a friend coaxed me into attending a kinda hokey local writer event (just not my scene). He was just behind me at Bennington, I think. I’d seen his funny TikTok videos promoting the book, which centered around a character (him, I think) in a pink skin-tight suit brazenly doing silly things in public places in a way that felt both wholesome and suggestive. Anyway, this book is excellent. I think it’s some kind of a pre or sequel to one of the other big Dazai books that I’m pretty sure I’ve read, but didn’t remember, and missing that connection didn’t detract from my experience of reading it. Haplessness, paranoia, enabling friends, etc. How could you not love a lighthearted, humorous depiction of suicidality(?)

Echo Chamber by Claire Hopple

I’d read pieces of this here and there online, and it was very cool to see them stitched together. Claire’s great. I said on X that every sentence is a delight. It gave me that pleasantly disoriented feeling that I find myself chasing. Being able to pin down exactly what’s happening all the time is honestly overrated.

Supremacist by David Shapiro

It’d feel unseemly to be effusive about this book. But I loved it. Pitchfork Reviews Reviews were big for me. Great example of how writing can be unapologetically tied to a specific moment in time and still feel fresh despite quickly becoming dated. Your fears are unfounded!

The Firebird Poems by Gerald Locklin

Graham Irvin was saying he liked Locklin, I think, and this is the one I could find, which I don’t think is one he particularly liked or recommended. I enjoyed some parts. Others fell flat. Others felt humorously politically incorrect in a retrospectively more enlightened yet ultimately unforgiving way. I didn’t rate it on Goodreads because my reading attention didn’t feel rigorous enough to render a judgment.

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It’s now November 3rd, 2025, and this blog post draft has been sitting for a while. I forget having read a lot of these books. I’m going to leave extremely superficial notes on a few and then hit Post.

Florida by Christine Schutt

I remember this feeling dark, like murky. I like this feeling in books.

God’s Green Earth by Noelle Kocot

I think Duggan rec’d this? Thanks for the rec, Duggan. I remember posting the cover and maybe an interior page to my IG story, and I don’t do that often, although I was doing that more often a couple years ago when I read this, so maybe it isn’t too reliable an indicator of my enthusiasm.

The Hermit by Lucy Ives

This was good! I do remember it being good. I also remember it being extremely short. Too short, apparently, because that’s all I remember about it. You gotta let me sink into a thing like this.

Nitro Mountain by Lee Clay Johnson

I was in the Bennington Writing Seminar’s cafeteria during a grad school residency, and met Lee, who is peripherally involved, primarily as a musician, playing the commencement music, as well as in The Dog House Band whose revolving players(?) at the time included David Gates and James Wood, though he may have also attended the MFA program there, I’m not sure/can’t remember. His partner at the time was also there, and she’d lived in Providence around the same time as me, and so I was describing a memorable Microphones/Woelv/D+ or Karl Blau show where the crowd was arranged into a blob and began jumping in time such that it felt like the floor was going to cave in. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember Lee’s reaction to my anecdote being something along the lines of “I don’t really listen to popular music.” Anyway, I still remember this novel quite vividly, and just discovered that he has a new novel out that I’m gonna have to go buy!

Proxies by Brian Blanchfield

I rationed out the essays in this book because one, they’re dense and long, and two, they’re so thoughtful that they demand a period of thoughtful saturation. Don’t rail this one. Do read it, though. The concept, to write solely from retained memory and knowledge and without reference, is inspiring, and whenever I’ve tried to do it like this, it’s gone horribly wrong.

Deliver Me by Elle Nash

This was a good, freaky book. I’m glad to see it’s done well and reached readers. I’d spent a bunch of time thinking about and preparing notes for an interview with Elle about her prior book, Gag Reflex, whose PR cycle seemed to be swallowed by this one, and so without really being direct about it, we abandoned that interview. I feel a little bit bad about that falling through, and I debated trying to curry the accepted pitch for that into one that touched on this then-new book as well, but I didn’t feel as qualified or prepared to do it justice. Sorry, Elle. You still rule.

Death Egg by Nathaniel Duggan

Wow. Super negligent of me not to’ve written this one up properly in a timely manner. I mean, I did blurb it, though:

From within the false balm of a hard shell and with the grandiosity of a final boss battle, Duggan plumbs the endless devastation of domestic disappointment, the impossibility of intimacy, gleeful villainy, and suffocating righteousness. Death Egg good.

Duggan jokes about this not even being the best book of poetry published by Back Patio, which I think someone else actually said, but that’s a narrow and sad view of art, I think, to compare things that way. Which I concede is a large facet of Duggan’s whole Twitter shtick. Which I think has served him relatively well, as far as book sales and engaging readers. So no complaints here. But I meant what I said in the blurb. This book is fantastic. I’ve given it as a gift to many people. As many people as I’ve gifted books by the other renowned Back Patio poet. Who didn’t ask me for a blurb. So, you know, make of that what you will.

The Plotinus by Rikki Ducornet

Kinda mischievous and grim like Evenson. Loved it.

South by Babak Lakghomi

This book has it all. Nefarious administrative hurdles. Illicit union activities. Structural quirkiness. Paranoia. Faulty, altered memory. Riots. Love. Big big rec from me!

I enjoyed reading this book and then taking it down to my basement to take a silly picture to post on Twitter. Now I’m enjoying posting this alternate shot from that same trip downstairs on my blog.

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts by Claire Donato

I pitched a “mention” to “The Drift” and received a form rejection for it:

The Analyst is the fourth story in the collection and serves as a rhizomatic legend for Claire Donato’s densely cathected auto-meta-fictional project: A long-distance sadomasochist lover actually wants to just be friends. Claire turns “to psychoanalysis to mourn the last shards of faith I had in heterosexuality,” and tells her analyst that Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is the book the therapist will write, while the patient herself intends to author The Analyst, an homage to Lolita but “more repressed.” Their therapeutic alliance resembles collaboration, then friendship, then fusion. Hyperintelligence is foisted into material asceticism, eventually giving way in later sections to the numinousness of small joys: the intuitively indifferent companionship of a new cat named Woebegone; the tactile pleasure of the obsolete technology of film photography; volunteer shifts at the co-op; thoughtfully prepared meals, shared. Claire’s unconscious unfolds: in the wake of many devastations, it’s an ethical responsibility to move toward light.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Mutual friends over the years have spoken effusively to me about the intense generosity of Rita Bullwinkel’s presence and attention (we went to the same undergrad program around the same time, and her aura was legendary even then), and though her first book, Belly Up, is a story collection I’ve recommended more than almost any other, this was the occasion for our actually meeting. I interviewed Rita about this for LARB. I sent her an email with my first question, and a few days later she hit me back with “What are the chances you’d want to do this interview on the phone or via zoom?” which struck the fear of inarticulacy into my heart. But I said yes, because (at the time at least) I was seeking new challenges and opportunities for growth. Having a conversation about a book, I reasoned, should be easy. And it was! Reflecting on the interview itself, it may read more naturally, but does feel slightly less substantive than what I might’ve mustered if given endless hours to tinker with pointed correspondence. And that’s fine. Headshot is experimental yet delightfully approachable, both quirky and deep, “high-concept” fiction finessed into a heart-rate spiking sports novel. Thankful to Rita, and to Medaya and Paul at LARB for working with me on this. I got to recommend this in paperback when I was at a bookstore with my mom a couple of weeks ago, that felt cool.

The One on Earth by Mark Baumer

Oh, Mark. I love you. We need Mark right now.

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I read these, too. Omission of detail about them is not a reflection of their worthiness (though in some cases, it is). Comment or DM if you want me to muster some tidbit about any of the following (your own book being fair game!):

A Kind of In-Between by Aaron Burch, Americanitis by Doug Paul Case, Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria, Closer by Dennis Cooper, The Employees by Olga Ravn, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge by James Tadd Adcox, The Emissary by Yōko Tawada, How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine, !!! by Mike Andrelczyk. Unmasking Autism by Devon Price, Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, The Guest by Emma Cline, Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks by Joshua Beckman, Frisk by Dennis Cooper, Show Me Your Face by Danielle Chelosky, Alice Knott by Blake Butler, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida, Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, Ablutions by Patrick deWitt, Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgård, Winter by Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring by Karl Ove Knausgård, Molly by Blake Butler, Richard Yates by Tao Lin, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle, Trilogy by Jon Fosse, Summer by Karl Ove Knausgård, Song for the Unraveling of the World by Brian Evenson, Bitter Water Opera by Nicolette Polek, Spurious by Lars Iyer, Participation by Anna Moschovakis

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November 4, 2025 Update:

Hebburn, via X DM said,

Tidbit me on “The Employees by Olga Ravn” and “The Map of the System of Human Knowledge.”

I’m actually going a little bit crazy trying to find The Employees to jog my memory. It’s not in my office (primary library) or dining room next to the stereo (newer, mostly fiction) or in the living room (art books, fantasy, and anime—mostly my wife’s) or in the bedroom (currently in progress or abandoned or finished but not yet reshelved). I remember really liking this one, it’s extremely up my alley. “A workplace novel.” Hard to go wrong, tbh. I recall… transmissions… almost like logs, or reports. If I were able to find it, I would reread it. Or maybe I would even send it to you!

These are the books I read in the month of December, 2022—

Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey

This one took me a while to get through because I’d have to stop after nearly every poem to take a picture of the ~2 pages I’d just read and send them to someone. This one’s more sprawling than Drunk Sonnets, though not as sprawling as A Better Word for the World, which is not a qualitative statement. Daniel Bailey is excellent in either mode. Need to figure out how to be more like Daniel Bailey.

The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

Hot dang. Just delightful. I marveled at how far outside my wheelhouse this novel is, how hard it must’ve been to write. A full small town of colorful characters. I oddly Stranger Thingsed them in my head, which was weird. The main character is a cop so I just pictured that warmly gruff handsome dude who also makes me think of Nick Offerman. And so the new wife looked like… oh gosh, what’s her name. Not Parker Posey. Not Helena Bonham Carter. Wynona Ryder? Rider? Ryder. The one who got in trouble for stealing stuff? Or doing drugs. Stealing stuff on drugs. Stealing drugs. I only watched one season of Stranger Things. I’d watch ~8 seasons of a TV show based on this book, or however many seasons there are of Stranger Things now. Oddly, I think it could actually be done. I wonder what the status is on this book’s IP. Somebody ring up Netflix. Thank you, Joshua, for sending this to me. I really liked it. (Just looked it up. Winona. Dangit.)

Characters by Derek Maine

I’ve really liked many of Derek’s pieces online. I’ve always compulsively winced whenever I see Derek doing Derek things on the timeline. I was ready to accept that I wasn’t going to get to this one given that life is short, time is precious, etc., but then I changed my mind. Not about life and time, but about getting to this one. I don’t regret it, but I also don’t think it was entirely successful. I think it failed in a compelling way. I admire Derek’s ambitiousness with the scope of this book and the way it’s woven together. It falls short for me in seemingly patting itself on the back for being clever or confessional or confrontational or risky, when it wasn’t really very much of any of those things. If you lose a friend for writing a thinly veiled story, by all means process that on the page. Fabricate around the edges for the sake of a narrative. Divulge some nasty secrets and make some up too so people can’t guess what’s real. That’s all great. Hmm. I keep going back and forth feeling like I’m being too negative or too positive, and I’m gradually talking myself into liking the book more. The individual pieces are good. They fit together pretty well. It needed some room to breathe or something.

Letters to Emma Bowlcut by Bill Callahan

Posted a pic of the cover to my IG story and got way more engagement than normal. A frequent contributor to NOON said “One of my all time favorites,” which made sense. The host of a literary podcast that I enjoy but don’t listen to very often said “Never seen one in the wild,” then “Is it good or is it wack,” then “I love Bill but I can see it going either way lol.” I responded “I really like it so far! It’s hard not to read in his voice, and is kinda charmingly overwrought like his lyrics, but the unselfconscious melodrama fits the epistolariness perfectly,” to which the pod host heart-reacted. Half of my favorite indie lit power couple asked “Wow, how is it?” I said roughly the same thing that I said to the pod host. I may have even copy+pasted part of my answer. I’m embarrassed by that. Another friend said “Cool.”

Literally Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder

I guess I just really like reading tweets. Especially good tweets. I like how someone’s recurring preoccupations reveal themselves when you get a nice corpus like this to digest in one go. It’s a great document/snapshot of a life. More of you should tweet like this.

Considering how exaggerated music is by Leslie Scalapino

So many of my friends favor brevity and clarity, so it’s nice to be reminded that convolution has its joys. Sometimes I forget who I really am and have been. When I posted this cover to my IG story, someone who has tattooed me a few times responded admiringly about the cover. I replied with the image credit, which is “Twin Suns” from Makrokosmos II by George Crumb. Curious about the piece, I found that it accompanied (and maybe even depicts the actual musical notation of?) a piano composition. I looked it up on Spotify and listened to ~30s before turning it off.

Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman

I get that I’m not fully “getting it,” but I’m enjoying not getting it. It’s horizon-expanding to mix up ideas of writing and mark-making and mapping and space on the page with different concepts of scale and interior logic for overloaded terms as if familiar English words don’t mean what I am sure they actually mean.

Funeral by Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao

Building off some assumptions based on formatting decisions about who wrote which portion of this text, I really enjoyed this absurd volley of legend, celebrity, food, and something even more geometrically elaborate than just a love triangle. Interdimensional love fractals?? One section appears to have been the framework—just the headers—for what could have easily been 24+ more pages of heart-rooted antics that I would’ve happily read, but I also enjoy what happens to the flow of time and consequence in the omission. It felt like a canny and clever decision that may have just been “feeling done with this.” Vi and Daisuke are very exciting writers.

Accept / Reject by Erin Dorney

Nice, spare, well-spaced, and meditative. Not too bleak or effortfully profound. Solid erasure work, engaging on several levels. Cheerful book object. A pleasure to own. Also, an easy way to get in a hundredth book on the last day of the year.

Told myself I wasn’t gonna do this this time/anymore, but had some notes and figured I’d post em. These are the books I read in the month of November, 2022—

The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson

Hadn’t read any Shirley Jackson (flagrant foul for someone who went to Bennington) and also didn’t have any firm idea of what to expect. These stories have that pervasive low-grade dread that I’m drawn to. Often, when late to reading someone super influential, their moves will have been copied and mutated so many times that it all feels familiar and almost too simple or obvious. That wasn’t the case here! They felt quite contemporary. I enjoyed that characters were named things like Piglet and Snark.

I Hope You Enjoy the Food by Zac Smith

This book is disarmingly “straight,” by which I guess I mean practical. There is advice, and it seems constructed in a way that is meant to be convincing and useful. Zac’s voice and humor is there, but it serves a concrete function. I’m tempted to actually put it on my cookbook shelf. This makes the third book of Zac’s that I’d consider giving to friends/family/non-readers as a gift. It helped me reflect on what I value and enjoy about cooking, and the role it has in my life. It gave me ideas for how to break out of a meal-planning rut. I’m torn between wishing I had a Zac-like person in my life (to feed me) and wishing I were more like Zac (creative, resourceful, subtly inventive about matters of sustenance).

Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

I got hung up on the passive voices and dislocation in this book. I couldn’t figure out how to relate to it. The food parts made me hungry. There were little glimmers of excitement, but it often felt (oddly, for a Dorothy Project book, in my opinion) very #flashfiction—linguistically pretty, intriguingly prickly, and “sensuous,” but without much of anything tangible to grasp.

Blindness by José Saramago

This book was tedious and exhausting. I disliked it similarly to the way I disliked The Marriage Plot. It had a wrongheadedness laying bare a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. A writer I admire recommended this, and I’m now wondering if she might secretly hate me.

Name and Noun by Stephanie Yue Duhem

Stephanie is smart and funny online. I thought it was interesting that when this was released, she disclaimed the “identity” aspects of it. Undergrad Crow would have loved the wordplay here. I don’t mean that as a dig; I’m much dumber now than I was then. Her twitter handle (@poetrygrifter) prompted the thought that buying and reading the book means that I am the poetry-grifted.

Feds on Vacation by Big Bruiser Dope Boy

I’d like to believe I’d have had the aesthetic integrity to dislike this book even if I hadn’t stumbled into Mr. Boy’s crosshairs, but I guess I’ll never know for sure. This reflection prompted some interesting thoughts about the subjectivity and arbitrariness of art’s “worth,” but teasing that out further here would be attributing more credit to this book than it deserves.

These are the books I read in the month of October, 2022—

A Horse at Night by Amina Cain

Amina Cain is one of my favorite writers, and Dorothy Project is one of my favorite presses. This is a very strange book (by which I mean it resists neat categorization), and despite my increasing aversion to “writing about writing” and my unfamiliarity with some of the books she mulls over most thoroughly, the ways she places unsuspecting texts in conversation and weaves shifting preoccupations, self-awareness, and interrogation make it totally propulsive. I got a little charge each night as I got into bed at the prospect of returning to these pages. Her “diary of fiction” is close to what I aspire to with my own logging of readerly impressions—an associative constellation (is that Adorno?) that honors chance and personal meaning-making such that a juxtaposition of references is converted into fresh, new thought. With creative and editorial permission and encouragement, Cain thrives while extending the effort of synthesis and thinking on the page.

The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras

This is one of the books Amina Cain treats with most recurrence and care in A Horse at Night, and maybe it’s symbolic of my markedly less intelligent synthesis that I let myself be continually distracted and amused by seeing the name “Lol” all over every page. LOL. I did appreciate the benefit of Cain’s connective leap from this to Ferrante’s novels, and the potency and volatility of female friendship. I loved The Lover, and am glad to finally be getting back to Duras. During the days I had this on my nightstand, Bonnie asked “are you reading an erotic novel?” and I said “no,” and described the plot, and she said, “sounds like an erotic novel.”

The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey

I’ve got decreasing (nonjudgmental) patience for drunkenness these days, but this book of heartsick poems totally won me over and reminded me of the occasional beauty of belligerence. It’s gleeful and sad and grandiose in the best way. Daniel saw me post a photo of the first edition cover, and, saint that he is, not wanting me to miss out on the added content in the second edition, sent me another copy! I’m doubly glad about the bonus book because the used copy I bought has extraordinarily inane annotations on every third poem (“weird wording,” “?,” “true,” “makes sense,” “sad,” and “he gave it his all.”) The nonsequitur and violent tendencies seem a product of the era (2012), but feel “earned” and so have aged better than I might have expected. Reading this, I felt very warmly toward Daniel, admiring of the longevity of his poetry-writing life (last year’s A Better Word for the World—mysteriously $5 on Amazon right now—is also stellar), and inspired (based on my perception of his social media presence) by the way he seems to balance his work, family, and creative lives with integrity and honesty. I repeatedly thought to myself, “Daniel Bailey is a gem.”

Animal Days by Joshua Beckman

Ok it’s probably obvious by now that I’m choosing poetry and other short books in my haste to make ground on my annual reading goal. I read Take It 13 years ago, saw him read, and had him sign it, and have since bought but not read several of his Wave books. The shapeyness of the lines in this book at first felt very deliberate and useful, giving it a runaway, playful kind of energy. It had a lot of momentum. Either the effect wore off a little, or the quality of my reading attention diminished. Overall, I enjoyed the pleasurable nature of word pairings and sequences, but had a hard time comprehending the organizing principle of the book. I’m not a great reader of poetry. If I were, I’d probably read this book several more times in order to truly soak it in, or something.

Genesis 0 by Isabelle Nicou

I really liked Paresis. I’m eager to read Stricture, in large part because it’s translated by Kaycie Hall. This one lay between! By no fault of its own, my enjoyment of this one suffered from my lack of reverence for theater actors / historical plays, though I admired the way early pregnancy and an abortion attempt are documented from the lens of physical embodiment. I will probably remember this one for the clarity of its scope and the finitude of its timeline, both of which are abstract ideals for my own writing. Beginnings and endings, what a thought!

being there with my sister transported me back to childhood trips to “elitches” (not sure what it is or was or has ever officially been called or how it’s spelled) in denver. after shepherding my kid around the smaller structures, failing to entice him up or down anything, and facilitating some play with cousins, I whispered to my wife asking for permission to abandon my post

teen cousin talked me into doing the gnarliest one first: prospector’s pan. you plunge immediately into deep darkness and then wind up going round and round this huge toilet bowl, and get flipped pretty much upsidedown when it spits you out

middle road one is probably the most pure fun, and they let you go down double. that one goes outside the building briefly, which is novel but happens so quickly and in the dark that it’s probably more of an eyecatching gimmick for people passing by on the highway (and a hassle for building maintenance)

then there’s the claustrophobic tubeless / body-only luge, kinda rough on the shoulder blades and “thrilling” but not really “enjoyable”

returned to kid duty, and enthusiastically recommended the middle slide to my wife. she would most likely have sat it out, but didn’t wind up needing much convincing

when she came back she said it was fun, but that her neck and back and head hurt, and she thought she might have whiplash

after lunch (1.5 hotdogs, diet coke) and some downtime (kids on tablets in hotel rooms to forcibly rest their weary bodies) we went back to greet the next wave of family in the waterpark

this batch of adult relatives mostly sat, so those of us with kids got back in the water. the space was cavernous and echoey, so the only way to co-exist comfortably with the noise was to contribute to it. the little ones were most interested in these fountain jets that they could stand, sit, and lay on. they discovered they could redirect the stream at each other. they started kicking and smacking the already airborne water. it was mostly acceptable kids-area behavior except for when the smallest of babies came crawling by. some other family was kindly sharing some toys that were fun to make race down the shortest slide. they were also fun to throw, but I tried to discourage that without going so far as to exert any actual disciplinary authority, figuring I’d need to save that for later

felt the impulse to ride a slide again, curious whether it might be possible to deliberately get stuck spinning in prospector’s pan or, alternately, go more quickly down its hole without having to swirl around so much. tagged in another adult to be attentive but not-too-near the kids (proximity seems to escalate conflict, while calm and slightly peripheral supervision allows them to work things out in their own way). tip-toed over to wait for someone to surrender a tube, climbed the ~4 flights of stairs, and launched myself down

satisfied, climbed out of the landing chute / lazy river and readjusted my clinging shorts. felt around back and noticed that the tiny key pocket had come unzipped. my hotel room key and credit card were gone

the lifeguard monitoring the bottom of the slides said she’d come find me if she found anything, but the way she said it conveyed the impossibility of that actually happening

decided to ride the slide one last time just to see if my cards were swirling around prospector’s pan. didn’t manage to enjoy this trip down. just joyless sliding

family acted more alarmed about my loss of cards than expected. tried to downplay it. dad insinuated that I hadn’t adequately zipped the zipper on my shorts. people commiserated about having to cancel my credit card and update all my accounts. privately decided I wouldn’t bother. if the card wasn’t lost, surely it’d be damaged enough not to work anymore

my wife went to get me a new room key card, and then went back to the hotel room to lay down, leaving me in charge of my son. my sister went to ride more slides with teen cousin, leaving me in charge of her son. little cousin playtime was fun. love my nephew. he’s 3. he’s so tiny. he said he had to go potty, so the three of us waddled over to the bathroom in the cold hallway outside the entrance. asked him “pee or poo” and he didn’t answer. he pulled down his pants and tried to sit in the urinal. airlifted him to the throne. it took him longer than it takes my kid, but we were all patient, and he did good. after, we got dip’n dots from the concession window

I’ve since been monitoring my credit card activity online. nothing suspicious showing up. there was one big charge for an airbnb, but my wife said not to worry about it, it’s for a trip she’s taking. I’m not worried about it. don’t worry about it