Wow! This commanding collection impresses by its delicious provocations. Each poem magnetises an astronomical genius; each sentence vibrates with illuminating sensations; each word is indivisible from the author’s intoxicating imagination. To read such a visceral debut is a delirious and radiant delight.
It is rare to find a novel where the writer’s magical gifts shimmer from the very first sentence. Casting a bold gaze on the gauzy wonders of rural America, this stunning eco-thriller weaves a dangerous adventure into a sacrificed world, one pulsating with acidic energies. Serious and sexy, microscopic truths confront the reader, twisting a strange series of impossible encounters into a knot of gothic pleasures. Violent gestures, vulgar language, and wretched semiotics are read in animal entrails and tea leaves. Blood, brains, and eros make this book a bizarre but enthralling odyssey.
Reminiscent of John Ciardi’s poetry, this playful collection maps a multitude of wordworlds spun from the writer’s inventions. Emanating with etymological curiosity, these thrilling odes to fungible flora reimagine language as aphid-infested roses and rapacious weeds like those currently consuming my desolate garden that I frequently forget to water. Wrecked with appetency, the poet lassos listless lightening forms.
This collection absolutely devastated me with missiles of private trauma. Each event, each character described in every grieving elegy blitzed my affects, bombed my selfhood, and beat my body with batons. I became insane with textual mayhem. I was at war with myself. I trembled with phobophobia. My skin became moist as I swelled with frightening delusions of city-wide destruction. What is communicable now? I screamed, recalling Bernadette Mayer’s experiments. Apoplectic in my terrors, a neighbour called 911. I was hospitalised for days, connected to various reading machines that drugged me back into fragile elocution. Yet I remain unrecoverable. I still struggle with the violence of the vernacular. I am mad with bitterness and detachment. The alienation invasion has begun. This poet will make you believe that the apocalypse has already arrived and the invaders have camouflaged themselves as poems.
I asked this poet if they might write a blurb for my upcoming book, but they never replied.
This magic realist novel is daringly infectious, an oracular miracle of the unremarkable like the elderly neighbour who passes my house every day. Her green shawl gives her hunch the appearance of an apple; her skin bruised and greased with shellac between shapeless wrinkles. I smiled cordially at her as I cleared my mailbox this morning. Her mulish boxer tugged aggressively on its leash before it arched its back and excreted soft chunks on the verge. She auspiciously evaded my deflating smile as she dragged the dissenting dog behind her. They call this Midwestern niceness. The community spirit is infectious. It is a miracle that anyone can live here.
Undoubtably peerless! I sat on my patio reading this collection’s surreal stories, sweltering in its sublime ecologies and the Ohioan heat. Maybe it was the unusually humid day, but I found myself slowly phasing into a queer sensation of time that slimed my body with a bewildering reality. I realised that I was evaporating, soon suspended in the air as if my solid matter had sublimated into a gas, and I could neither hold nor recognise any object within my reach. Even this book was no longer no longer a book. A tree was no longer a tree. The atrophied lilacs in my garden had transformed into inexplicable creatures for which there was no name. Words disengaged from their signifiers. Indexes indexed only absences. Nothing became no thing. The wreckage of syntax fractiously dispersed my vapour. The space between cells became a secretive emotion as they drifted further apart. I was no longer myself. I doubted my humanity and the authenticity of speech. I did not even hear my neighbours fighting, although I later saw fragments of a boundary peg shattered on the road.
Here’s to a writer who troubles the truth. I orated this historical novel in the town square; I wanted to broadcast its luxuriating prose with the statue of the civil war soldier at its centre. He was an excellent listener, more alive to Mammalia than the strangers who loitered on the sidewalks, fixated upon their phones. I realised that the more I read, the more I kept circling back to the novel’s beginning. I tried desperately to break this pattern, choked and hacked at the start of each cycle. The horror persisted until I could only repeat one sentence. Soon even that sentence succumbed to a single word. Hello, I said, hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello. Hellos lowed in lows. Alarmed, the syllables leeched from my lips, while my mouth slid into an orbit around an event horizon. I could not escape this horrifying loop. I did not know how to satiated my desire for peaceful evacuation. A young woman in a faded thin blue line tee cautiously approached from her flower stall. Her crucifix appendant abraded the tacky morning light. What the hell is wrong with you? she asked. I could only reply hello.
This audacious translation from Esperanto into English displays the writer’s sturdy skills that confidently exceed the structure of the original novel unlike my neighbour’s patio, which collapsed under this year’s end-of-winter snow. Several months later, I am still waiting to see if he will fix it. Violent winds had pulverised the glass panels of the roof last month, and the frame now lies fully submerged in the dirt. My sensibilities feel a little like that, abandoned by careless ownership. Perhaps it is better to leave a body wedged in the loam where it fell like the protagonist in this story. Even a corpse can claim a home in the clay.
Like the basket of granny smiths I have placed next to my mailbox—three feet from a pile of rotting dog poo—this collection of lyrical essays intimates a visionary blueprint for sustaining a common life. Foregrounding a critique of eco-suburban capitalism, our writer demands that we nurture spiritual zones to reclaim our agencies and impulses towards kindness. But first, they insist, we must disentangle ourselves from those ideological machines of surveillance that enforce hyper-individualist behaviours. I take this to mean that we must overthrow the HOA. To acknowledge human fragility, as they suggest, is to nourish the conditions for human flourishing. Perhaps an uplifted world begins with an apple. I hope that my elderly neighbour takes one; she is late today. I miss her shitting dog.
Part puzzle, part travelogue, this anonymous collection of poems transported me to foreign lands that flickered in and out of existence. I was merely a tourist among floating signifiers, deeply unsettled by althedy customs that had banished me to the periphery of an aversive culture. Their material artifacts were beyond my comprehension. It was as if each poem were an object and each object was an eye floater. I tried to focus upon the individual squibs as they strayed across the vitreous humous, but they always evaded direct perception. A jelly-like feeling flittered within me. It was evanescent, phlegmatic, and alien. Perhaps it was saudade, but I also felt wistful and eudemonic. At times, I sensed a fugitive joy on the margins that might arise if one gazed upon William Carlos William’ plums or the mandarin a colleague shared with me in his office while we prepped for an upcoming class. It was so delicious and sweet I thought about the poems for days.
I promised this author an interview and two years later, I still have not transcribed our conversation.
Truly, this detective novel is enigmatic and unsettling. I experienced a shuddering vertigo if I tried to put it down. I even read it while I wandered through the supermarket trying to locate the pasta section. They have been renovating this store for months now, and the location of each food section changes every time I shop. One day the rice and beans have displaced the wine; the next, the wine has colonised household cleaners. Once, I found the bananas next to the dog food and flower bouquets. The deli has completely disappeared. The store is transient and restless. I always shiver with a deep unease whenever I explore the aisles as if I am a refugee, defriended by civilisation. I have to be vigilant. The staff are secretive and suspicious. They surveil the items I place in the cart. The cashiers speak a corrupted tongue I cannot decipher. I can’t decide if I am Alice in Wonderland or Kazan from Cube. Today, I ran into an exhausted woman with two screaming children in the international foods section; her white blouse stained pink from tomato soup. Help, she said, I’ve been stuck here for days. I realised then the shelves had shifted again, and I was now in the frozen foods section. I never found the pasta.
To be happy, the novelist insists, you must eliminate your fear of the future and the memory of your life. The spirit of Seneca’s plays returns us to tragedy as each scene nuclearises his moral crises and quotidian self-discipline. This unnerving new writer never leaves you waiting, unlike my elderly neighbour, who I have not seen for days. She is normally methodical in her routine. I had a vague idea of where she lived, based on her politically reactive posts on Nextdoor that usually end with we can tell which party is the most immature or there is only one King we need to fear and that is Jesus Christ on judgement day. I think her name is Neveah. I triangulated her position using the little clues she left online. Two days ago, I retraced her steps as best I could. I obsess over schedules and panic when they are disrupted. I arrived at a ranch house with two signs on the manicured lawn that read as for me and my house we will serve the Lord and love like Jesus. The garden was freshly mulched. Daffodils and tea roses flourished in the afternoon sun. Feeling bold or jealous, I knocked upon the door. A middle-aged woman answered with a fox terrier yapping at her heels. I cannot describe what I felt in that moment. I attempted to explain why I was there, but she coldly interrupted no solicitors, slammed and locked the door. We suffer more in the imagination than in reality, as Seneca once said.
The hypnotic prose of this soulful short story collection dribbles like toothpaste on my red blouse. I always zone out when I brush my teeth. Of course the toothpaste dries and I go about my day without realising I have little white splotches on my clothes. I usually notice them when I am about to go to class, and then I frantically dab the blouse with water in the bathroom (or, embarrassingly, attempt to lick them out). Once a stranger pointed at them and squealed you’re so witless. I realised these silly birdshit marks more accurately describe my emotional state when every English word sounds like prisencolinensinainciusol. This collection lulls me into stupidity.
I love dictionaries and reference books, and this lyrical edition of Raymond Williams’ Keywords is an outstanding contribution to our modern vocabulary of poetics. Intrigued by the anatomy of the author’s experimentalism, I compared his references with the entries in my two volumes of The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (A-O and P-Z), which my PhD advisor had gifted to me several years ago. Although it wasn’t really a gift. He didn’t want to carry them on the train after he cleared out his office. I pulled the OEDs from the shelf but soon abandoned my task. I needed to find a word for the elusive feeling that has haunted me for days. I explored entries for sadness and comfort, sorrow and gratitude. Irenic thoughts also blistered upon my surface. I could sense that word speaking nearby but also at a distance. I don’t know how to name this emotion, because it feels specific to a place, like homesickness, while also stateless in a way that is freeing. I am struggling here. Is it a momentary sense of Kairos? I couldn’t find an entry that articulated this experience. In desperation, I turned to obsolete words and etymons for guidance. Despite the colonial impulses of the English language, it is depressingly poor in its emodiversity. I would like to compose my own word to describe this evasive emotion but without cultural currency, it will wander without meaningful context. How do I coin a lexeme that forecloses its definition? I highly recommend this reference book even if it provided no answer.
An unflinching revision of the ordinary. This stunning study into a poetics of banality juxtaposes stillness with persistence. Entreating that we must observe the absurdity of everyday life, our author embraces an enduring futurity, an afterlife for the self as we await the forthcoming anthropogenic disasters. Each essay asks us not to contend with our failures but to grapple with grace against our endings. Do not surrender to deficiencies, he cautions the reader and maybe my neighbour, who finally demolished his patio last night. I watched from my window as he fecklessly smashed the metal frame with a hammer until it finally foundered. His exaggerated rage was almost cartoonish. I hope he will build another one just to watch it fall. Truly, he is a visionary.
A genre-defying sequel to their debut metafictional novel, the author’s fragmentary prose is absolutely unforgettable unlike the gift that has lain on the backseat of my car for nine and a half months. I purchased it to thank a colleague who wrote a letter of recommendation for a residency programme. I hate how these elite nonprofits require references—and not one, but two. It is humiliating to ask a peer to commit even more performative labour than they are already doing. I assume he said appreciative things even though I was rejected. The thank-you card has since detached from the gift and slid under the driver’s seat. Chip crumbs and tar have smudged his name on the envelop. I can’t actually remember what I had purchased. I see him every day but I keep forgetting to gift it. At this point I am so embarrassed that I am starting to ignore him like flies on decomposing stool. I guess the meaning of gifts and poop can change over time. Maybe I will offer it as an apology instead. Feel free to edit this blurb any way you wish.
We are living grimly as this novel proclaims. Climate catastrophe inflicts unpredictable damage in this strangely jocular ghost story. Real-life monsters communicate via a constructed language, while they seek global address during a hurricane similar to a recent whole-gale storm that trounced our modest town. At some point in the night, the winds felled one of my trees and broke Mister Patio’s fence. I needed access to his yard to cut it up. I knocked on his door to ask for permission but left a note when he never answered. Maybe he speaks a different language, I thought. The next day I left various messages in German, Italian, Tagalog, Hindi, Spanish, French, and Korean on his door, although I doubted the accuracy of Google Translate. Days passed and still I received no response. Determined to communicate, I explored auxiliary languages like Esperanto, Volapük, Ido, Lingwa de Planta, Uropi, Lobjan, and Pasilinga. I even tried Quantum Language and emojis. Maybe English was fiction. Sometimes I combined different elements from these languages, pasting his door with interlinguas. For the nini: me dijica-bezonas adönön a tua korto-por haki kaj forigi la drev 🙏. Without realising it, I had created a linguist cult. Over several weeks, I attracted a cluster of loyal followers to this neighbour’s yard. Gibberish was the only legitimate expression, we declared (in Gibberish). Our nonsense drew another neighbour to my sermons. What in God’s name are you doing? she asked. Lien met sot! I cried passionately, imitating a smiley face emoji with my hands. She pointed at his driveway. His car is not even there.
My students have informed me that this lyric poet’s traumatic escape and tumultuous recovery are very relatable. His cinematic montages certainly staged me in his poems of freakish survival. Admittedly, I haven’t lost any family in a war, famine, tornado, drought, or ocean surge. I don’t know what it feels to finally be reunited with them after a prolonged absence. Unless I count that moment when I clocked my elderly neighbour, shuffling passed my house this morning. I was filled with relief until I noticed that she did not have her boxer behind her. She refused to look at me when I greeted her in the driveway. She ignored my apples. It is hard to describe this feeling. Death has many half-lives. I was both sad and delighted to see her.
Nothing happened in this story. Nothing was said. The book was completely blank. It was a comfort to see the empty pages. I focused upon the act of turning the leaf instead. The motion felt radically calming. Sometimes these simple gestures say more than any manuscription. Like when I was sitting in my colleague’s office, waiting for a student to arrive, and he began to peal a mandarin. Do you have another one? I asked. He broke the fruit in half. This is the last one, he said. Let’s share it.
Orchid Tierney is a poet, scholar, and knowledge worker, originally from New Zealand. She is the author of this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive, 2025) and A Year of Misreading the Wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) as well as several chapbooks including, pedagogies for the planthroposcene (above/ground press, 2025), looking at the Tiny: Mad lichen on the surfaces of reading (Essay Press, 2023). Orchid teaches at Kenyon College, is a senior editor at the Kenyon Review, and invites you to visit her website at orchidtierney.com.