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

Inferno by Eileen Myles

After listening to Myles’ appearance on 1storypod, I felt the poverty of my exposure reflected in my unfamiliarity with their work and asked Sean which book to read first and he said this one. I liked it a lot, and thought it was funny to project onto my interpretation of the book the similarities between it and Fuccboi in the narrator’s drive to be a sort of pure, clarified, and serious artist, all while (as Sean might put it) scrappin’. It felt jumbled (deliberately, sure) and long, which are not things I would say of Sean’s book.

You Will Never Be Forgotten by Mary South

One of these was a New Yorker story, and the rest feel like they’re trying to be. I don’t mean that as a dig, and admittedly they lean a bit more “speculative” than the average NYer story I’ve read, but they’re pretty neat and clean, timely, and observationally critical of contemporary culture. In some ways this book also feels like the most saleable possible package of stories a writer coming out of an MFA with an intent to publish might hope to have. It’s also one of several books I’ve read recently that’s deeply indebted to Diane Williams, though the lineage here is less evident than in Ashton Politanoff’s and Kathryn Scanlan’s books. The language is still very careful and calculatedly askew, but there’s maybe less emphasis on economy. It’s clear that Mary South is a very good writer, and I’m eager to see what she writes next.

Time as a Sort of Enemy by Tyler Dempsey

First I need to sing Dempsey’s praises a bit. In the last couple of years that I’ve been involved at XRAY, he’s been an unbelievably diligent and reliable reader of submissions. I think all of his reading has crystallized his taste, and I admire the way he applies that sensibility to his writing. Here’s a phrase that came to mind while I read this tiny collection: Lonesome Horny West. Its breathless, borderline misuse of commas and dashes invites audible parsing, maybe somewhat like Gaddis’s J R (which I liked but never finished). The book has a nice cadence of reflective, punchy endings. I was extremely amused by the image of burglars stealing frozen hams.

SCANNNNDY by KKUURRTT and Barracuda Guarsico

I sometimes get bogged down when reading collaborative works in trying to attribute units of language, themes, and arcs to a contributing author, and I was glad not to be tempted into doing that here. I have the Limited Halloween Edition, which is orange, and the photo collages printed on transparency sheets are a neat, higher-end feature to insert into what is otherwise a pretty DIY-seeming stapled pamphlet. I don’t have much familiarity with the referential touchpoints in it, but I really like the playful approach to poetry here. Sometimes people say “no matter what you do, you should have fun when you’re writing” and then I’ll read something where it’s clear someone had fun and I’ll think “ok, maybe don’t have that kind of fun while writing.” I think more people should have this kind of fun when writing.

A Picture-Feeling by Renee Gladman

There’s something clumsy and blunt about the word “defamiliarization,” which I guess is why I am reluctant to use it despite it being more or less a big part of what happens so successfully in this book and in Gladman’s other work. Writers often obscure things for some reason (or no reason?), and it becomes exhausting work for me to latch onto anything and feel motivated to continue deciphering. I think Gladman is a master of holding things at arm’s length, just within reach, continually rewarding me for grasping.

There Has Been a Murder by Evan Nicholls, Evan Williams, and Benjamin Niespodziany

I like all these guys a lot. They do fun hybrid/interdisciplinary-seeming stuff, and it’s all at a bare minimum tinged with greatness. While one of the pieces here contains my first name 291 times, the first piece is the strongest, and I recommend everyone read it. The rest of the book is also a worthwhile prismatic exploration of the concept behind the chap, and you’ll probably get through it quickly and easily after the first one hooks you. It will hook you. If it doesn’t, you and me probably don’t like much of the same stuff.

Dunce by Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle gave an excellent pre-recorded virtual talk about erasure at my last graduate school residency, which was remote. It would have been awesome to see her in person. There’s a rumor that it’s pretty easy to stumble upon Mary Ruefle swimming in a certain pond near campus, but I can’t confirm it, and don’t recommend blowing up her spot. What would be the point? In fact, I’m suddenly feeling protective—I probably shouldn’t have said anything—please stay away from any body of water you suspect Mary Ruefle may frequent unless she specifically invites you. Here are some phrases I liked from this book:
“a great zoom of sadness”
“a loose tooth going back in time”
“I saw a surfer drink a wuthering wave”
“So much is missing / from the middle of the day! / Despite my best efforts / at individual enjoyment”

What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland

I can’t remember how this got into my pile. When I search on Twitter for references to Hoagland with the “From people I follow” filter, there are a lot of appearances from people I like. I sent the mj slender man fan club 🏀 groupchat the best poem in the book (“Social Life,” about being quiet/antisocial/drawn to nature at parties) as well as the worst (“Rap Music,” about, uh, being racist, I guess). Graham, a legit and unironic galaxy brain when it comes to poetry said “like a lot of poetry like this, it’s good when there’s a big sweeping image boosted by hurried breathless lines, and it’s bad when the language is both too formal or informal in a way that is winking rather than realistic dialogue.” Zac said some thoughtful stuff about guilt and reflection. Troy said “I like the guy’s name. Sounda like food. I’ll take a Tony Hoagland and a coke.”

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart

I sent a barely comprehensible gigachads-on-computers meme about theology to Jordan Castro/his digital content team and he/they said “Amen” and “i listened to a p book book about that” with that being how everyone’s probably going to heaven. The book was maybe even less comprehensible to me than the meme, but I enjoyed getting the sense that more Christians are dismissing eternal damnation fetishism. I was surprised to find myself bristling against simple assertions of truth, as well as the author calling things “absurd” and “ridiculous” even when I agreed with him.

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

College Novel by Blake Middleton

I thought An Actual Person in a Concrete Historical Situation was great so I figured I’d work my way back. I bet people compare this to other books, but I won’t. I enjoyed the disorientation of what opens feeling like a collective voice with lots of undifferentiated characters, though it eventually settles and centers around “Jordan,” which made me question the decision to narrate in 3rd person, since (as it’s free to do) the voice gets closer and closer to him. It wound up making sense, though. It was funny and bleak but not depressing. The banter is hilarious and heightened, almost like if Hal Hartley wrote a script about kids with rich social lives in the year before they become cooped up shitposters.

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux

This was a Danielle Chelosky recommendation, though Sebastian Castillo also posted about Ernaux last month so my curiosity was primed. The ebook copy I had was full of weird encoding glitches, where what I believe were em dashes came out looking like this“smashed up between words“but it was surprisingly undistracting. This one is full of heat and ache, and I am eager to read more. I also enjoyed triangulating some throughlines shared by some writing by Chelosky, Ellen, Ernaux, Kraus, and Nicou, and could easily spend more time in that universe.

Modern Massacres by Timothy Willis Sanders

TWS has great stories on XRAY and elsewhere, and I had been meaning to track down a copy of one of his older books, but this one was announced and released at just the right time for me to jump on it. The shape of these stories is unexpected and sometimes unsettling—their endings aren’t concerned with closure or tidiness or epiphany or any of that junk, which isn’t to say they’re uninterested in convention or tradition. The voice and style were consistently measured, and the pacing felt “literary.” I’m not really sure what I mean by that. It’s a quick read, and several trains of thought and scenes from it have stuck with me.

You’ll Like It Here by Ashton Politanoff

I liked Ashton’s related work in NOON and (maybe more tangentially) Blue Arragements’ Lazy Susan 2, and was excited to check this out. The PR about it being “in conversation with Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, and Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9—Fog” suggested it’d be very much up my alley (those are all books that I love), though in some ways I wish I’d gone in with fewer connective references so I could’ve reckoned with it on its own terms a bit more. That said, I enjoyed the way the archival newspaper voice and mostly-page-length rhythm had the effect of a sensational carnival barker reporting on thefts, deaths, and curiosities. Reading this felt a bit like walking through one of those historical reenactment villages.

Agitation by Alexandrine Ogundimu

I’ve been trying to read this for a minute! I ordered one months ago, and Philip Best over at Amphetamine Sulphate tried to send it twice, I think, but was thwarted both times by the USPS, and I felt bad about him racking up costs so I let it go. But when the new Isabelle Nicou (translated by Kaycie Hall) became available, I added it to my cart again. Alexandrine is so good. I feel lucky to’ve read the excellent “unauthorized Tiger Woods biography” portion of her collection coming out with FERAL DOVE. I’m somewhat shocked (and I mean this as a compliment) that Alexandrine’s style survived an MFA program. There’s a rhetorical excellence on display that knows exactly how strong a hold it has on your attention and so can get away with what might otherwise come across as verbose or repetitive or rambling, but in fact flows beautifully. I’d expect to lose patience with so much summary action, but it’s still somehow completely rife with drama. The narrator’s preemptive dismissal of his own sexual interest as autogynephilia, the self-consciousness of feeling like his deviances were nearly stolen valor, was especially compelling.

Cheat by Danielle Chelosky

Danielle Chelosky keeps bringing the heat. Each of her chaps is so good, and even her newsletter is full of top-tier writing. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about teen romance in a way that isn’t super cringe, and Chelosky nails that here. It allows no room to second guess the size of the feelings. The honesty and immediacy keep it from feeling melodramatic. I’m such a big fan.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

I have this nasty conversational habit of prefacing everything I have to say, giving context that’s meaningless to the recipient until I’ve reached my point, after which the preamble is inaccessible to memory. I think it’s bred by a certain kind of academics, or a predisposition of a personality type, but I think it probably irritates most people. I imagine they feel the way this book makes me feel: anxious. So much imposition, supposition, and uncertainty! A majority of the Dream Boys group chat recommended this, and I did the audiobook version. The reader sounded a little bit like the actor who plays McNulty on The Wire, who did narrate the audiobook version of The Remains of the Day. My heart broke as Boris kept desperately praising the repair manual half-thinkingly gifted to him by the narrator, Ryder: “I really love this book. It shows you everything.”

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

Duplex by Mike Nagel

I picked this up because of Mike’s podcast conversation with Graham Irvin in which Graham says that his book Liver Mush and Duplex are “the same book.” I love Liver Mush. These books aren’t the same, but I still liked Duplex a lot. It felt clever, with a good mix of humor and honesty. Maybe it was sometimes slightly too aware of the fact that it was being clever and funny and honest? I was pleasantly surprised and impressed, though. I’m not sure why I was skeptical. 

Cheap Yellow by Shy Watson

Shy Watson is so talented. Each of her books has a distinct energy and set of preoccupations while also sharing an intimacy and generosity. I had to refrain from taking pictures of lots of pages and posting them onto the internet. I think this is maybe the only published book of hers I hadn’t yet read, unless there’s some obscure chapbook, which there probably is. I bought her last available copy of this one, I think, which also appears to be otherwise out of print, and she wrote me a nice note inside. That made me feel good.

June by Daniel Brenner

FENCE sent me this because I’m a subscriber. I’m confused about which books FENCE is sending, and when, and why. This one and some others they’ve sent seem to’ve come out years ago and have almost no action on Goodreads. This one was fine. It didn’t do anything obnoxiously poemy. There were some nice bits of language and images. It was short, hooray. I feel like I might not be FENCE Books’ target audience, or that maybe FENCE Books don’t have any single target audience. I’m happy for them to publish whatever they dang well please—they’ve put out some stunners, which means I’ll gladly grant them some leeway.

Dave: poems volume 2: I AM DAVE_HELLO #2 by Dave Poems

It’s pretty uncool that this pseudonymous joke poet is writing funnier and more emotionally pure books than so many “serious” poets who are “actually trying.” Yes, it all relies heavy on the bit, the character, but I’m buying it. This one felt less punchy, less organized than volume 1, but its aimlessness allowed more space for unexpected resonances. Another fun mini-game aspect of reading Dave is trying to parse out clues about who Dave is. There are a few hints here that lead me to believe Dave is actually a collaboration… but I’ll say no more.

The Vacation by Garth Miró

This seed was probably planted in my mind by the cover aesthetics, Jon Lindsey’s blurb, and the knowledge that Sam Pink also had a hand in editing this, but it did remind me of Body High, which I loved. This one is similarly outrageous, plotwise—even moreso, I’d say, and maybe less personal. There’s some fun had with language that gave otherwise action-packed sequences some artful flavoring. I’ve enjoyed Garth’s short stories online, and was interested in how his style would translate to the longer format — the chronological confines of a cruise seemed to help him give it arc and scope, within which it sprawled a bit.

A Picture Held us Captive by Danielle Dutton

Wowowow. This one is like a new prism through which I can’t help but looking at all the other stuff I’ve been reading. Danielle Dutton seems a little bit like a prophet. I’m sure she can do wrong, but I’ve yet to see it. This book is a nice book object, and is very short, adapted, I think, from a shorter essay and/or a lecture, which is evident. It’s the kind of original “artist-on-art” idea posed with some healthy conjecture and assertions, the right set of examples, and some “self” woven in to keep it interesting and honest—not too academic. This book delivered as a lecture would easily be the most memorable highlight of any given Bread Loaf or Tin House or whatever.

Until it Feels Right by Emily Costa

This book defied all of my expectations for what reads like a therapy diary in the time of COVID—seeing the threat of infection and heightened hygienic concerns through the lens of OCD was very jarring, and that novelty helped me look at something that otherwise feels too recent and still relevant to be able to reflect on in any beneficial way. I tweeted about this moment in the book: the speaker’s partner gives her a “vintage” Beavis and Butthead shirt for her birthday, but she can’t help herself from checking the tag, discovering that it was made in 2018, and then simultaneously getting mad at him for giving her another shirt (something he’s already overdone) when folding laundry is an especially difficult task while also being down on herself for failing to resist making it a thing. Beautiful human moment. I wanted more kid/partner/family drama like that, but maybe that’s greedy of me. Some things get to stay private.   

Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore, 1994-2007 by Dan Ozzi

I skimmed somebody’s substack post about this book—they’d skimmed this book for the bands they cared about. I cared about some of these bands in their heyday, appreciated some in hindsight, and have essentially grown past being able to sincerely enjoy most of them other than for the nostalgia hit they can deliver. Yasi shouts it out in some Bandsplain episodes, too, so I decided to check it. I was annoyed by the formula applied to each chapter—the way it distills each band and region and fanbase and subgenre into a conforming arc: 1) swearing they won’t sell out, 2) being courted by major labels, 3) selling out, 4) having disappointing sales (or not), 5) burning out or blowing up. It felt really reductive, almost like middle-school book reports. The quotations all blended together. In almost every section, someone says “we felt pretty sure so and so was the next Nirvana.” Boring! I listened to this one, and the audiobook narrator didn’t especially help.

The Cows by Lydia Davis

For some reason it felt really urgent that I read this, and for a while I couldn’t remember/figure out why or find it. I was convinced it should be collected in some volume I owned, but I came up dry. Then I realized it’s mentioned briefly as an example of Danielle Dutton’s expanded definition of ekphrastic writing in A Picture Held Us Captive, and I found a digitized version. It’s really good! It’s a permission-giving work: you can write about whatever. Just look longer and harder than most people usually do, and say what you see. That feels true of drawing/painting, too, not that I know anything about that.

The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson

I bought this because Troy James Weaver was talking about it. I’d mistaken it for Nat Baldwin’s Red Barn, which is funny because apparently Troy and Nat connected over a shared appreciation for The Red Truck. It’s a Lish book, for sure. The cover is kind of hideous. I liked the opacity of the book’s sexiness, which is to say, there is sex but it’s not sexy. Maybe it’s recency bias, or I’d think this of any “Bonnie and Clyde–like adventure,” but it had some parallels with Bud Smith’s Teenager. The perspective and chronology shifts felt a bit Faulknerian, too—I feel like I’ve read fairly widely, but still have so few reference points…

NOON 2022 edited by Diane Williams

I’d delayed ordering and reading this issue because I was feeling bitter and spiteful about my growing pile of NOON rejections, but Kathryn Scanlan cited Lydia Davis’ journal excerpts in the conversation we’re wrapping up for BOMB, so I felt motivated to get over myself. Scanlan’s pieces are standouts, fully deserving of the first pages. A handful of pieces from names I recognize and like were slightly disappointing. Hedgie Choi was a standout! Thanks to its aesthetic coherence and the brevity of each piece, it was a pretty propulsive read on the whole. I think it might not be too hard to train an AI to write a convincingly NOONcore short story. Have you seen those generated greentexts? They’re good! By which I mean enjoyable, though devoid of intent, which is, I guess, something I perhaps mistakenly expect from “art.” Reading Davis’s diary excerpts, I lamented the brokenness of my brain as I thought, “these would make great tweets.”

Avoka by Elle Nash

A while back, Elle was selling a few physical copies of this and I missed out by DMing a few minutes too late. I felt out of luck, assuming there was no other way to read it. Recently, while preparing to interview Elle about Gag Reflex, I discovered that this was freely downloadable. The chapbook excited me for the way it revealed 1) the consistency of Elle’s preoccupations (which clarity I think spares her work from feeling repetitive even when it touches on similar characters, settings, topics, and themes), 2) how much Elle’s grown as a writer in not very much time, and 3) an aesthetic attention, which was present here but has also become more pronounced. The structural idea of orienting some related stories around a town is a familiar move, but is nonetheless clever, and adds to a sense of both cohesion and also a kind of literary worldbuilding, where my mind starts to fill in gaps and guess at the other stories taking place around these ones.

Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi

The more loosely I held the plot and curbed my impulse to “figure things out,” the more I was able to enjoy the impressionistic jumble of semi-paranoid scenes. I felt immersed in a hazy, rainy Bostoneque setting, or at least a mood that I associate with memories of something like that, though maybe I’m making that all up. Despite “knowing better,” I enjoyed assuming the protagonist’s name was “Babak” (I think he’s only ever called “Bob” in the book as a way of preventing people from mispronouncing it) which I heard spoken in my head by Giancarlo DiTrapano’s voice from when on podcasts he’d often speak highly of Babak. I’m excited for Babak’s forthcoming novel.

it sucked it looked fake man
that was theuglies thing i’ve ever seen
YOU ARE THE WORST SKATER I HAVE EVER SEEN. MY FRIEND THAT IS 5 IS BETTER THAN YOU.
fuckin suck fuck you suck
that was pretty sketchy
fukin crap
bloody boloks
didnt get to see it cuz my computer sucks ass and wouldnt play the stupid, so my rating is that it sucked, ha ha ha
LOL 5 stair…. hardcore man!
Aww what a rebel, you suck! My 6 year old nephew can ollie down a five stair.
This is one ill piece of footy
is this a joke, who the fuck have time to put shit like that on the web?
this is one of the crapiest things i’ve ever waited to download

Lodged in the “Parables” section of David Shields’ and Elizabeth Cooperman’s anthology Life is Short — Art is Shorter, “The School” is cited as “articulating [Donald Barthelme’s] entire vision of the world.” The categorization is justified on the grounds that the piece has a “take-away,” with characters, events, and narratives subordinated to “aboutness,” in this case “textbook existentialism.” I appreciate the framing, but suspect it’s simultaneously too lofty and shallow, both splitting hairs and painting in broad strokes. For me, the thrilling and most effective aspect of “The School” is its runaway momentum. Time lapses to compound increasingly concerning instances of fatality in and around a teacher’s classroom, climbing the parallel ladders of dark comedy and grave danger. The narrator’s conversational account is defensive and pleading, eager to rationalize yet unconvinced of its own explanations. The story is a flurry of fate and fatalism, responsibility and culpability, a reckoning with the insatiable needs of sustained life in its many forms, a prismatic attempt to reconcile individual/collective and local/global concerns.

The narrator backtracks so as to initially conceal the extent to which things are going wrong, and betrays his own inability to reason about the misfortunes implications and possible interconnectedness. “I don’t know why they died, they just died.” His not knowing is interpreted as something he’s afraid will be perceived as a shortcoming for someone who’s assumed the burden of making things make sense to children. He asserts feeling, though, says “it was depressing,” showing that he’s not immune, not personally disaffected. His desperation that things be “explicable” shows the narrator casting his lot with the children in their affliction, confusion, and vulnerability, and yet, given his position of authority, he seeks the silver lining of the teachable moment: the snakes died because the boiler was shut off because of the strike, which is something the children can and do grasp and appreciate.

Searching for somewhere to place blame, he breaks down a couple times and implicates the children: “at least now they know not to overwater,” “well, now they know not to carry [salamanders] around in plastic bags.” This slight hint of enmity (something that seems inevitable if not natural in any imbalance of power) gets flipped when the class rescues a dog and names it after him: “They had a lot of fun running after it and yelling ‘Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!’ Then they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I don’t mind being kidded.” It’s possible that this is meant truthfully, but it seems equally plausible that he resents the teasing but knows not to confess it. Further, he’s resigned that the dog is not spared, and that its demise is only deferred. “As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, Oh Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then … And that’s what it did.” The narrator is diligent enough to check the supply closet each day in anticipation of finding the dog dead—which eventually happens—but not enough to make any effort to prevent it from happening.

All of this death builds to a crescendo when the children forsake simple innocence and converse in chorus, “is death that which gives meaning to life? And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but isn’t death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday must be transcended in the direction of–” The absurdity of this collectively voiced philosophical back-and-forth competes with the unlikelihood of everything that’s precipitated it. Rather than a grand theorem, “The School” serves as a hesitant postulation, a focused telling of a community’s failure to stave off the inevitability of death with sacrificial distractions that only perpetuate a cyclical confrontation of mortality.