new from above/ground press: Cahill, Earl, Cavaleri, Niespodziany, Comay/Fagan, Birchard, Chernoff, la Rocque, carisse, Hill, Nećakov, Siklosi + Bjerg/Jung,

BAD TEMPOR, Jimmy T Cahill $6 ; SOCIALLY AWKWARD GHOST, Amanda Earl $6 ; Studies, Micah Anthony Cavaleri $6 ; The Man, a sequence of foolish men, Benjamin Niespodziany $6 ; The Sun Will Bleach It Away, Rebecca Comay / Cary Fagan $6 ; DIDIKUY, Guy Birchard $6 ; SLOPTIMISM of the WILL, MLA Chernoff $6 ; Circling the Black Sun, Lance La Rocque $6 ; That H uman E ffluence A nd P lastic, russell carisse $6 ; a nest, a burrow, a lea stone, Jeremy Luke Hill $6 ; The World is Beautiful, Lillian Nećakov $6 ; household: meadow, Kate Siklosi $6 ; eyesore, Johannes S.H. Bjerg and Charlotte Jung $6

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
October-November 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

And did you see my report on this past summer's above/ground press 32nd anniversary event?

To order, send cheques (add $2 for postage; in US, add $3; outside North America, add $7) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button (above). See the prior list of recent titles here, scroll down here to see a further list of various backlist titles, or click on any of the extensive list of names on the sidebar (many, many things are still in print).

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material; and you know above/ground press has a substack now? sign up (for free!) for announcements, and even new features! catch recent/forthcoming interviews with Guy Birchard, Jill Stengal, Lillian Nećakov, Cary Fagan, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ken Norris, Michael Sikkema, Ben Ladouceur, Nathanael O'Reilly, Micah Ballard, Lydia Unsworth, Amanda Earl, Buck Downs, russell carisse etc.

With forthcoming chapbooks by: Glenn Bach, Travis Sharp, Sonja Greckol, Frances Cannon, Stuart Ross and Jason Camlot, David Gaffney, Kevin Spenst, Jill Stengel, Mrityunjay Mohan, Buck Downs, Salem Paige, Robert van Vliet, David Phillips and probably others! (yes: others,

AND 2026 SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE NOW AVAILABLE (but you probably already know that,

Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

MLA Chernoff, [Squelch Procedures]

 

Oh, enema of the skin—
there is only one pome in this collection,
and it is this one:
            a cross-legged inkblot
swaying on command,
triangulating $40 facial serum
into the langue of a
busy training day, learning
to oust a cop to deadland with
glistening brow and heavy-handed knuckleballing,
the kind of Molotov you wouldn’t
kiss your dermatologist with.

Your scratching up a
funky, funky mix of:
yes! We really do exist, we come from
sun dust and hashtags left clothe-pinned
in blime-nosing winter, where the noise
won’t cancel itself with nuance-blocking
butt plugs, blunt-shy of metaphor, lolling
into the meridian of a flaming
squad car. 

Simply and overtly,
you make your parents proud,
but I’m just as loud.
I ask of you to polish my lens,
over and over again. (“How to Kiss Like a Spinozist”)

Toronto poet MLA Chernoff’s full-length debut, after the publication of a smattering of chapbooks and other ephemera, is [Squelch Procedures] (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2021). I do like that there have been poetry collections that have appearing in Canada over the last while—Rasiqra Revulva’s debut Cephalopography 2.0 (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2020) [see my review of such here] being another good example—that can’t easily be characterized or compartmentalized. There’s an incredible energy to Chernoff’s ongoing work, one that holds echoes of the polyphonic language and language-theory jangle-jumble gymnastic through sound and play of Canadian poet Adeena Karasick [see my review of her latest here] and even back to the work of Paul Celan. Words as they’ve been utilized prior are but a limitation one needs to move beyond, and Chernoff’s poems don’t even begin until well beyond this simple mantra. “Later-still I dunk my comrade, my opulence— / her name is Sailor Mercury / and I dunk her into the bowl and I / drink of her; I become her,” Chernoff writes, as part of the sequence “SQUELCH i (Mercury in Paris),” “into the bowl I go, / for a quick swirl / into the bowl, pipe-hot and chafing for a tuck, / if only for a lip-exonerated blip— [.]” There’s such a heft to Chernoff’s lyric, one that exudes a kenetic energy and phrenetic mishmash; Chernoff writes squelch as a way to crunch, squish, mangle, mash-up and tumble, roughshod over sentences.

There’s a simultaneous sense of enormous play and anxiety that writes of, around and through theory, sexuality, Jewish identity, social media and machine language, references to Stonewall, sound and image, therapy and multiple other directions, often multiple simultaneously. The strength of Chernoff’s poetic is the ability to move in so many directions while holding to a singular purpose, writing against impossibility into a language of complex thought. As the back cover offers, Chernoff “uses conflicting definitions of ‘squelch’ as a springboard to contemplate the vibrant, mawkish epistemologies that emerge in tandem with trauma, poverty, rigorously enforced gender normativity, and curbed childhoods.” There is an enormous amount going on in this work, and it is impossible to remain a passive reader. Referencing one of the poems that later fell into this collection as part of his interview over at Touch the Donkey, posted earlier this year, Chernoff writes:

Whereas “So, Thus” uses my own squelchy life as an anchoring point, my vispo is all over the place. It’s almost like constraint-based poetry without any constraint––a permafried succession of ‘pataphysical bleep-bloop click-a-dicks, with my silly ass hovering over the glitchy keyboard of my laptop at 4am, as Illustrator eats up all my RAM until everything crashes and I'm left with the autosaved remnants of my non-Euclidean monstrosities. It’s been very therapeutic, and much more energizing than anything I've ever produced.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Chernoff, Olsen, Barbour, Ballantyne, Novak, Paty + Fishman,

Anticipating the release later this week of the twenty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-eighth issue: MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty and Lisa Fishman.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty-seven issues (over one hundred and eighty interviews to date) remain online, including: Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering, natalie hanna, Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-ninth issue features new writing by: Bill Carty, Michael Turner, Nina Vega-Westhoff, Sarah Alcaide-Escue, Colby Clair Stolson, Robert Hogg, Elizabeth Robinson, Tom Prime and Simina Banu.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-seven issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2021 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Spotlight series #47 : MLA Chernoff

The forty-seventh in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Toronto poet MLA Chernoff.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu and Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter.

The whole series can be found online here.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part three,

[this is what Gary Barwin looks like while reading the latest chapbook by MLA Chernoff] 

See my first post on what I collected at the fair, here; and my second post here. And I am totally going to keep pushing these two other upcoming fairs: Meet the Presses in Toronto on November 16th and the 25th anniversary event for our own ottawa small press book fair on November 23rd (and pre-fair reading the night prior). I will see you at one of these events, at least, right? I mean: how can you resist such small press marvelousness?

Toronto ON: I’m intrigued by the earnestness and the directness of the lyric narratives that make up Toronto poet and editor Terese Mason Pierre’s debut chapbook, Surface Area (Anstruther Press, 2019). There is a meditative calm in Pierre’s lyrics, one that is inquisitive, careful and considered, such as the poem “Cold Feet,” that begins: “Three in the morning, I am / awake under cloth and commitment [.]” Her poems work to articulate and unpack complicated emotions, whether the small moments of awareness before a partner wakes, or in the midst of family during a funeral. As she writes to end the poem “Swell”: “I’m learning to like when my hair / gets in my eyes when our skin // swells. I’m trying to be a person / who can be built from sand.”

Lines

You know where you’re going,

but this city is unfamiliar to me.

Every story you tell has its own

highways and cul-de-sacs,

leading to laughs you cut short,

a brief peer over the hedge

to the green on the other side,

or a welcome overstayed

on purpose. It is irrational

to envy the time before I existed.

In the attic of your childhood home,

I see you in the orange glow

of a lack of someone to please.

I put my hand over yours

as you hold a photo. I do not

recognize any of the thousand words.

Peterborough/Toronto ON: Subtitled “found poetry constructed from psychic scam junk mail addressed to previous tenants” is Peterborough poet and fiction writer Katherine Heigh’s latest, the chapbook To the People Who used to Live Here (Gap Riot Press, 2019). The author of the chapbook PTBO NSA (Peterborough ON: bird, buried press, 2019) [see my review of such here], Heigh has now produced two chapbooks constructed out of found materials, shifting and collaging, although this particular project feels less a straightforward “found” than her debut; perhaps this assemblage is more prompted and propelled by found materials than specifically constructed by them. Either way, the poems are curious short bursts of lyric narrative—with intriguing line breaks and cadence—that explore how one finds place in the world. Her rhythms are hypnotic, and her short narratives are fascinating. I would be interested to see how these poems, structurally, differ from her short prose.

Grandmother Moon Calls

She is offering all this to you, a Golden Legacy

            specifically

intended for you. Providence has replied to

resurrection of the ancestral.

It’s quite natural. Please receive what must be

            long to you.

Going to bathe in an ocean of multiple and

            infinite joys

isn’t that life-changing. Your name appeared in

            the last lunar phase.

Say goodbye to your desires.

At the end of this, you can no longer be a

            person.

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one,

Thanks to Kate Siklosi, I recently participated in the first ever small press fair organized through TIFA (the Toronto International Festival of Authors, an event formerly known as IFOA: International Festival of Authors), carting an assemblage of new and recent above/ground press items to fill an entire table at Harbourfront Centre (they even provided tablecloths! Classy). It was a grand event! There were nearly a dozen exhibitors, lovingly curated by poet, editor and Gap Riot Press co-publisher Kate Siklosi, including Baseline Press, Simulacrum Press, Invisible Publishing, Augur Magazine, serif of nottingham, Anstruther Press and Proper Tales Press. After our small fair, I was even able to on-stage participate in a panel discussion on small and smaller press that Siklosi moderated, alongside Dani Spinosa, Stuart Ross and Terese Mason Pierre.

There are two further fairs over the next few weeks, in case anyone is so inclined: Meet the Presses in Toronto on November 16^th (which I am most likely attending, dependent upon Christine’s health and energy) and the 25^th anniversary event for our own ottawa small press book fair on November 23rd (and pre-fair reading the night prior, at the Carleton Tavern by the Parkdale Market). Might we see you at any of these?

Here are a couple of items I picked up during that TIFA event:

London ON/Vancouver BC: I picked up a copy of the eagerly-awaited chapbook debut by the remarkable Vancouver poet, editor, interviewer, writer and critic Isabella Wang, On Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press, 2019). I even managed to snag one of the final copies of the first edition (produced in an edition of eighty copies, the chapbook has already gone into a second printing). Composed, as she writes in the acknowledgments at the back of the collection, “in my last year of high school, from September 2017 to August 2018” (yes, the author has yet to turn twenty years old; deal with it), the poems in On Forgetting a Language present a clear, narrative lyric, one that shows an impressive confidence and capability.

You thought you’d be happy

now that you are doing fine.

This past summer in bed

you pictured yourself falling

out of an open window

to nowhere—your first summer

spent away from home.

She said she wouldn’t watch you

throw your future away,

waste seventeen years of

thankless upbringing

on the impracticalities of writing.

If you are going to do it, she says,

leave. So you did.

And anyway, she tells you,

you’ll never find work as a writer. (“MOTHER EXPLAINS MEN”)

What becomes curious through the process of this collection is in being already aware of a small handful of her poems composed since the pieces presented here, and her writing is already quickly improving in leaps and bounds (there was a ghazal she wrote a while back that I was particularly taken with, for example). If you aren’t paying attention to and supporting the work of Isabella Wang, you won’t have the opportunity to delight in the strength and the vibrancy of her writing, and a curiosity exploding in every direction that has already accomplished a great deal.

Cobourg/London ON: As part of Proper Tales Press’ 40th anniversary year comes London, Ontario writer Amelia Does’ latest, AMSTERDAM: THE ABBA VERSION (2019). Does is a new author to the Proper Tales roster (see her essay on the press’ anniversary here), but has self-published three prior titles as well.

HANGING MOON

Me with you

in the fields

dark clouds

hanging moon

there is a bird

in your hair

you do not

believe it

There is an odd straightforwardness to this collection that is delightfully bent, and often moving in more than one direction simultaneously. Her poems move easily from the short lyric to the short prose poem, each propelled by a particular kind of narrative that might bend or twist, or break off at the end.

TRUE TALE OF TWINS AT THE WEDDING

A set of short, long-bearded, alcoholic twin brothers lived in my building. Well, one did and the others elsewhere. I heard tales of their ramblings. Once they were invited to a wedding in a small rural hotel. They started the evening drunk, before the reception. Soon one fell over. The other dripped with beer.

Soon they were forced to leave, and placed in a hotel room next to the banquet hall. Soon they got angry, and started to toss bottles. Soon one broke through the wall, back into the party, with a table let; the other, a chair.

Toronto ON: From Gap Riot Press comes MLA Chernoff’s latest title, the joyfully confident TERSE THIRTY AND OTHER KISSES (2019), following on the heels of their debut, detet this (Hybrid Heaven, 2018). The poems here are wild, deliberately pilfering, breaking apart and reassembling Charles Olson’s work as their own, existing as both satire and savage critique, composing something new out of the old. There are some incredibly vibrant fireworks across the full spectrum of Chernoff’s performative lyrics, one that exists as a response to a prior work, and a poetics that was seen, for a very long time, as radically new and different. Chernoff responds to this work in a new way, easily, seeking out their own position and newness in such an overworked and overwrought space as literature and poetics, and they may just have found it.

Pometics are not manifested into manifesting toes: we don’t want Nietzsche’s Warhammer 40K collection; we don’t want Kant’s hands because they’re so dry from Purelling themselves all the dang time that they don’t even exist and it just sounds like a bit too much unpaid emotional labour for our liking; we don’t want Hegel’s dirty feet because wow just wash ‘em urself, mate; most of all, we only kinda want Marx riding a donkey at some Occupy event in ’08, but mostly, we desire the donkey’s life story and a few hyperlinks to some hot pics that the donkey feels comfortable sharing with us in encrypted group chat after the revolution: it’s neither a utopia nor a Cocteau Twins-scord Fruitopia commercial—perhaps heaven and Las Vegas.

In short, don’t offer more breathy men, give us the pometics of taking pride in the self-satisfying narcissism of loving but not knowing of emotionally encountering the All through the boing boing circuit of erotically encountering the All through the boing boing circuit of desire kissing illegibility at the margins of too many books we have gifted each other but never cared to gloss because being roommates is more than enough and we’re scared and you’re scared of forgetting to remember and remembering to forget; that is to say, enacting anxieties and anxieties in action.