This is my first book of poems. I self-published it in September (2024) through my friend’s and my small literary press, Moon Base Books. It’s very good. You can check it out here, and you can buy it direct from the printer here. Below is a picture of the cover and a sample from the book. Below that is a short reflection on the process.
This moment, as the others, is written in vectors: adrenaline release, television screen, and shrinking pupils: photons, idioms, and spin. The hills around us are burning. The sun is red all the time now and smoke leaks past the windows.
When you tried to speak you couldn’t. Countless splatter of action figures puked up and piling on the lawn.
Hymn of the lizard brain and human fear. Hymn of the simple things we pretend we are to pretend we know us. Hymn of being like anything else, allowed only to connote.
Dawn light. Overpass and cherry trees. As into a crush of mirrors, the signal comes and hungers across the body to be bent by it. Strange to be learned this way, messaged through this silent, timeless light.
When you wake up you wake up to a story you’ve been telling yourself. It’s simple: stubble, cough, hall light beneath the door, mouth guard removed and sour, cat meowing for food as you brush your teeth. Another newness confused with familiarity, another clattering of compositions, from function to function, another boiling heaven of beating hearts in trillions webbed and messy and colliding with each other crushed and computed enough to look like a toothbrush. Good Morning.
This is what living still feels like. A slow walk between splendors. Filling in with the world like a prism and splitting it into names.
”At first, the poems in Tensegrity seem like small machines, disassembled and leaking grease into an overgrown lawn. It becomes clear after the first few pages though that these machines on the lawn connect, and that the result is a living thing “soggy with the laws inside [it].” Tensegrity is a book about being smeared across different layers of description and discretization. We are both human and humanity. We both are and are not our selves. And though we are not who we used to be, the poems remind us that we are made from them.”
I started writing Tensegrity in early 2020. It’s my COVID book, but it’s also my new dad book and my Alameda fire book.
Before my daughter was born I gave up writing for about eight months to figure out how to do it without being a disruptive maniac. When I did, I saw my old voice didn’t fit me. It was too hopeless, too corrosive, and too comfortable being so. So I took all the writing I did with that voice, all 500+ pages of it, and put it into a single text file. I then took that text file, turned it into a Markov model of the writer I used to be, and used the 50 word outputs from that model—bite size, nonsense caricatures of my old voice—as my starting point for something new.
I think the result is an improvement. There is still some hopelessness, and some passages still corrode. But the comfort of giving up is gone.
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
—Italo Calvino
from Invisible Cities
Written on: December 8, 2024