Interviews & Reviews
THE SURRENDER OF MAN: A CONVERSATION WITH NAOMI FALK by Rebecca Gransden
With The Surrender of Man (Inside the Castle, 2025), Naomi Falk examines twenty works of art, using each as both touchstone and springboard for scrutiny of modernity. An exhibition of the psychic space inhabited by the intersection of time, memory and art itself, the book unravels as a stream of commingling impulses. Falk’s often febrile interrogations display a hunger to get to grips with the interior world as it probes contemporary existence. At times raw, inspirited, raging, and contemplative, the volume acts as a catalyst for the author’s questioning nature, and stridently asks what the hell is art for anyway? I spoke to Naomi about the book. Rebecca Gransden: What led you to The Surrender of Man for the title?Naomi Falk: The title had been in place before the book was anywhere near being finished. My attraction to it is a little complicated. There’s an obvious element of gendered language that goes hand-in-hand with the biblical proportions of the phrase, and it felt interesting to me to have a title of the book that was pretty deeply conflicted with the text itself. The sentence within which the title is housed is a significant turning point in the text, at least for me. RG: When reading the book it’s immediately clear that a great deal of care has gone into visual presentation. Was this a collaborative process with the publisher, known for their attention to the aesthetic experience of a book, or did you make strong stylistic choices from the book’s early inception?NF: John Trefry designed the cover and then Mike Corrao designed the interiors, and I am woefully indebted to them both for giving such a gorgeous body to the text. John and I already had such a strong overlapping aesthetic impulse, which was part of the reason I was so intent on working with him. He designed the emblem of my name at the bottom left of the book, which speaks to our mutual love for metal…. We actually did an hour-long set for Montez Radio together a few months back.RG: Objects possess transformative potential when you look closely, fastened by their makers—both human and otherwise—and cracked into the world.When considering the book’s formation, how much thought was given to its status as an object, an artwork, in its own right?NF: I am extremely invested in the book as object; I’ve worked in art book publishing for years; I’m an editor but also a designer and producer and publisher. Of course I’m going to care about those things; this isn’t an assembly line. Hundreds and hundreds of years of bookmaking history behind us. So much to draw from; so much at our fingertips. A text deserves a beautiful vessel! And a book doesn’t have to be expensive to make. I’m not going to waste my time making something that looks and feels like shit, even if I’m fine with buying things that look and feel like shit. RG: You’ll see how arbitrarily I’ve come across most of these works of art.An obvious question concerns how each work of art is chosen for inclusion in the book. You cover this aspect at length and I was struck by how the contemplation you offer becomes part of the book’s quality as a whole. When you reflect on the selection process, what stands out to you now? photo credit: Andy ZalkinNF: A lot of the younger artists in the book are folks I met through the passages of my daily life (which is outlined in the text). The lasting creative ramifications that someone’s work can have on you become most pronounced once you’re no longer in continuous contact with the artist: people move, new lifestyles emerge, we grow away from each other and become variants of ourselves that might not be compatible with the people we once knew. But the essence of their art and their ideas linger and entwine with your own work. Those hazy tethers come up again and again. Friendly spirits.It was also important to me that this not be a book of my favorite artworks. We have lived through such an intensity of listicles and “favorite things” in the past fifteen years, I worry we confuse the artist with the artwork they love…RG: They are taking over.The above quote is referring to words, words taking over, and suggests a multitude of interpretations. The book’s language at once contains the potential for manifestation, a means to precision, but also intrusion and alienation, an occupying force. For The Surrender of Man, was a clear stylistic approach embarked upon from the start, or did this evolve over time?NF: My writing evolved a lot over the course of writing the book, which took quite a lot of time because of the research that went into it (and because of the necessity for me to continue experiencing art to finish it). I kept feeling a pull to abstract the writing more and more, to imbue it with less uninterrupted academicish-leaning research and more language. The art in the book IS the lifeblood of the text, so the feeling of the language really needed to reflect a relationship between me and the art, and not just my projections… It actually caused some problems for me on an artistic level, and I made several revisions to the entire manuscript, which probably made the book messier than it ought to be…RG: How does the idea of confession arise in the book? Do you view The Surrender of Man as belonging to the tradition of the confessional?NF: To the extent that I implicate myself in the book, yes I would say it could be shelved within a tradition of confessional writing. I certainly don’t have plans to do it again!RG: What parts do dreams play in the book? You recount a recurring dream, and many times your responses to art are infused with the rich, uncanny symbolism associated with dreams. How conscious were you of the unconscious when writing The Surrender of Man?NF: I was possibly even over-concerned with the unconscious when writing the book. My dreams, and the dreams of others, are the wellspring of my writing practice. Increasingly, increasingly, it feels as if life is just the dream’s interlude. RG: No other generation of writer had been inundated with disembodied—but verifiably real—other people and their thoughts and feelings during the writing process in this way. Felt special, cursed, fresh.I think it safe to say that we are at a point in history where a lone mind has never before been exposed to such a number of psyches outside of its own. When it came to the writing of the book, is this something you moderated, or, alternatively, encouraged?NF: To use a phrase received from said outside psyches, there is a fair amount of “whataboutism” that I experience as I write. A tendency to want to make things more and more universal or interpretable to the point where what I am writing becomes only thinly tethered to its original meaning. It’s a real problem, and I’m working on it.RG: The idea of transformation recurs throughout the book, approached from differing angles. When you set out on The Surrender of Man, did you know what you wanted from it? Has that perspective shifted since its completion and publication?NF: On a broad level, the yearning and satiation of creating and publishing your work is so bright and abstract; it’s really hard to put into words. At one point in past years it all felt quite far away…I am happy I had the chance to experiment with the format, and that everyone involved with bringing the book into the world was supportive of that. As I mentioned earlier, the opportunity for the text itself to go through a series of new iterations, because of the freedoms I was afforded by Inside the Castle, supported every other intention of the work. RG: The format of the book seems a natural one for you, and is potentially endlessly mineable. Would you consider a further book of a similar kind, or do you feel you’ve explored the format for as far as it can go?NF: I aim to keep working within the nonlinear, and mostly nonnarrative. Although my current project DOES have a “story,” the “story” could be condensed into a few sentences. So many other people are writing good “stories.” I’m not a good storyteller, so I can leave it to other people to bedazzle readers with twists and turns and enticing character development, for now.RG: What don’t you want the book to be?NF: A definitive guide to interpreting art. RG: You mention an early attraction to transgression and horror, particularly horror movies. Are there films you would consider as complimentary to The Surrender of Man? Any recommendations?NF: I’m not sure if any films—excluding, perhaps, film essays—are complimentary to the work, or at least I haven’t found them yet. This text is very much in the service of other mediums. But if we’re talking about spooky movies…I suppose that my impulse for theatrics and drama comes from the obvious blueprints: The Hands of Orlac, any number of Poe adaptations, the Universal Monsters. I am obsessed with giallo films, the Saw franchise, Herschell Gordon Lewis, anything with a fantastical edge, the original and remake of Candyman, Hard to Be a God, Woman in the Dunes, and everything that Anna Biller has ever done. Is this turning into a listicle? Importantly, my friends Chris Molnar and Amy Griffis and I just saw the New York premier of the new Quay Brothers movie, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. That one is on my required viewing list. No one does it like they do. RG: Are there notable works you almost included but left out of the book? Or works you’ve encountered since the writing of The Surrender of Man that you wish could have featured?NF: I mean, kind of yes, but I need to fight that impulse. The purpose of the book seems to be the happenstance nature of so many of the inclusions, and if I tried to think of the scope of art outside of the specific years during which it was written, I would be doing a disservice to my own project.RG: The messiness of my mind has only become more pronounced as years and their memories accumulate. My ability to thread a cohesive narrative or to focus on a singular topic can’t parallel so many other writers I admire and I’m sure you can tell by the writing here that I don’t really want to find harmony and cohesion anyway.To what degree is The Surrender of Man a response to internet culture?NF: I think that most of my work is steeped in my lifelong participation in internet culture. I love the Web; I still feel excited about it every day. It raised me, in many ways. Video games have been instrumental in my writing style. The sense of awe I felt watching my dad play Myst when I was a girl has never left me. The strange collapse of distance between me and friends and strangers in the early years of AIM. Roleplaying in the Neopets forums. Being on MySpace trains… I don’t think The Surrender of Man is a response to the internet insofar as it has a sense of fragmentation or perhaps a lack of “focus.” I am looking for connection (within myself and with others) through my work in the same way that my internet personalities are signals or offerings…RG: The book is released by Inside the Castle. What attracted you to work with them, and how have you found that process? NF: Chris had brought Inside the Castle to my attention years ago. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t already familiar with them at the time, because as mentioned previously, I have an existing foundation for appreciating the kinds of texts ITC publishes. Work that offers an unusual amount of experimentation, work that might even be unconcerned with being understood. It’s been the best experience; no notes; a true dream.RG: I’m screaming into the bathtub because it brings me clarity.What has The Surrender of Man brought to you? NF: Solace, quiet, a sense of heightened wonder in regards to others and the work they create.RG: Where next?NF: The closure of this portal opens a new one, so now I’m working on a book-length piece of fiction.
October 8, 2025
Fiction
HEIR APPARENT by Jack Lennon
1
Your wife was overjoyed when your uncle drowned in three inches of water at the bottom of a cave. It meant your family would inherit his house. Although you both wished it wasn’t in such tragic circumstances. That’s what you kept saying to people. Not that you had any strong feelings about him or his death. You barely knew him. Was spelunking in Chile a normal pastime of his? Nobody knew him well enough to tell you. Not at the funeral, not during the will reading, nor when you took his place in his very respectable neighbourhood. They would say he was a strange man. An eccentric, one elderly lady had said kindly, more kindly than was necessary. While your wife ripped everything in your uncle’s dingy house out to start again, you took a strange, small set of stairs down to the piss room. That’s what you’d both end up calling it later. It wasn’t quite in the basement, but also wasn’t on ground level. It was as if your uncle had specifically requested the room be created, on its own separate level. Inside, it was a perfect square, lined with shelves which were, in turn, lined with jars of piss. All in the same type of jar, large and wide, which distorted the wall behind in varying shades of yellow. All were labelled with numbers you could discern no meaning from. Some were so aged the piss had turned dark and rusty inside, winking metallically at you, standing outside the piss room door.2
Ten years later, the piss jars stood, immovable. Your wife had wanted to get rid of them as quickly as possible. She thought them disgusting, a reminder of a sad old man, not well and not liked. The more you’d learned about your uncle, gleaned through the stacks of papers found throughout the house, the more the two of you understood him to be a bad man. Not just an unkind or cold man, but a man who actively worked to disparage and ruin those around him. There was a time where your wife even believed the jars of piss to have played a role in his evil deeds. Maybe they were cursed, she’d whisper to you in the night. You didn’t know any more than she did. Despite the overwhelming physical evidence, you secretly believed your uncle to be misunderstood. You fought to keep those jars. Not only to preserve them, but to live alongside them. At first you could say it was because of the difficulties of moving so many heavy jars up into the daylight surface of the house, not to mention the horrors of accidentally dropping one. But now, with your wife ten years tired and your children ten years grown, arguing to keep the piss room feels futile. But every time you’d looked at it and thought how much more sensible it would be for you to use this room for storage, or a home gym, or a man cave, visions of your uncle, choking to death in an inch of stagnant water sprang into your mind.3
Your uncle had started spelunking late in life. Like almost everything else, he did it alone. The drowning seemed to be a long-overdue inevitability. There were many letters from his old instructor begging him to take a buddy next time. One of these days he wouldn’t come home. The last day you saw your kids, you got a letter from your father. It spoke of the day you were born, and the hopes your father had had for your future. It apologised for how hard things had been when you were younger. It told stories of your uncle when he was a young man, the paths he chose that led him to this end. He loved his brother, but he was a troubled soul, your father told you. He needed things others didn’t. After that letter, more came. Official documents from your wife’s solicitor. Late payment notices for the electric company, complaints from the HOA. Then, one handwritten and yellowed, from your uncle. It detailed his plan to reach out, just when he knew your resolve would be close to giving out. He told you not to listen to your wife or your father. They had a vested interest in this plan going wrong. He knew you’d be up for the challenges this lifestyle would demand of you. He knew there was something different in you from the first day he saw you. You would be the one to hold this heavy burden. Not just for yourself, but for all of mankind. None of this surprised you. You have left the fear and uncertainty of earlier years behind you. You are chosen. You are capable. You are not going to die face down in a puddle and you are not going to become your father. You are the guardian of the piss and you are going to live forever. You slot both letters into the piles of yellowed papers in your office. The piss jars glitter at you in the darkness and you linger for a moment before you close the door. October 7, 2025
Fiction
PORTRAIT OF YOU IN FIVE PSYCHICS by Kirsti MacKenzie
First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked. “Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?”“In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the hell.”“You’re gonna have some kind of experience,” he says. “Very abnormal.”Buddy led me into a room in the back of a woo shop three blocks from our apartment. The room was dark but for a salt lamp. Took my hands into his. Told me he was blind from birth, that he sees things. Takes someone’s hand and sees flashes, impressions. Big life events. Traumas, he calls them, both good and bad. His hands smelled of menthol.“Looks like a spaceship,” he says. “With an octopus on it.”“Feels a little on the nose,” I say.“You will have trouble believing it,” he says. “And even more trouble convincing other people.”“No shit,” I say.When he was a kid this guy took the hand of a school teacher and told her she lost her ring, and that she’d find it in the couch cushions. Sure enough. My problem is that I am prone to believing these things. I am, as my ex says, suggestible. Open-minded at best, gullible at worst. I sit down and say hit me, motherfucker. “It’s not gonna hurt me, right,” I say. “Mm,” he says, unconvinced.“I don’t care if I see it,” I say. “Just don’t hurt me.”You might not believe this, but there’s logic to it. People visit psychics and card readers for control. To know everything is gonna turn out okay. Like if I only know what’s coming, I can prepare. The bad will hurt less. The good will sustain me. But nothing prepares you for a fucking UFO, and nothing prepared me for what he said next. “Have you ever had a kiss, like, BANG,” he says. “Fireworks.”“No,” I say.“Not yet,” he says.“With the alien?” I ask, helplessly.
***
Nobody tells you you’re going to get divorced while snorkelling with sea turtles in Maui. Not right that second, not exactly. But maybe one day you’ll be on a tourist boat cannonballing along the broad side of a crater into water so blue it makes you seize up, like you’d drown happy. There isn’t a word for how blue the water is. Around you there will be other sweaty tourists flapping in the water, huffing through masks, pointing and waving at sea turtles. Your husband kicks gently toward them and as you watch him hover above, giving them space, just curious, not an intrusive jackass like the others, you will see him engulfed in the blue and your first thought will be oh, no. Maybe, I mean. Not exactly like that. But something like it. There’s always a moment. The first in a long line of them which leads you to lawyers, and long talks with family, and whispered goodbyes to his back in the middle of the night, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.***
In the middle of the reading, menthol guy goes to blow his nose. I record the reading so I can remember everything and the part that I keep coming back to is the part where he leaves to blow his nose. I whisper what the fuck just barely loud enough for the audio. I remember that what the fuck because it felt like being knocked out. One haymaker after another, sitting there, being told all these, I don’t know—things—about you.“I like this one,” he says. “You go to take hands and dance. He puts his hand on your back, like—and I can see you through his eyes. He really treats you like a lady.”“Oh?” I say.“There are rings involved,” he says. “You pick them out together.”“Oh,” I whisper.He turns a little bit red in the face.“You really enjoy undressing him,” he says. “You waste no time, girl.”“OH,” I cried, belting laughter. There were other things, more specific things. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know but was struck too dumb to ask anything useful. All I did was repeat, oh, okay when he found a new memory, or future, or whatever it was he was seeing, all these beautiful scraps of you, and when I did finally get the courage to ask what you looked like I inhaled sharply—the sound of it, a hiss on the recording—because the big dumb asshole he described looked exactly like the one I’d asked for when I stood in front of god.***
When I left the woo shop we went to the grocery store. We were still living together. We gave ourselves a year and it was okay, because we were still best friends, still needed each other. Made shopping lists and fed the cat and hollered at our sports team. But I couldn’t tell him about the psychic because he doesn’t believe in them. Fair play to him. He’s very studied in science and medicine. Things that you can prove, things that don’t need wild faith or willing delusion.So I stood in the toilet paper aisle feeling tilted. Like I’d been knocked off an axis. The lights were screaming fluorescent. Carts and people flowing around me. If this were a movie there would be some kind of excellent soundtrack, something profound playing while I had my little spiritual crisis, but this is hot stupid life and so I stood there stunned while Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” droned on around me like my own personal Vietnam.No proof, but possibility. You are a possibility, now. Something I can’t unknow.***
I didn’t mean to go to more psychics. I swear. But it became something like an experiment. The idea was to cross-reference the data. Like if someone could tell me, again, what you looked like, or about the slow dance, or the rings, or the tearing your clothes off—maybe I could believe it for real. This was how I found myself in some grandma’s garage on a hot July day, an hour and a half out of town in a suburb. You don’t want to know what the Uber bill was. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. He’s a mess.”“Uh,” I say.“Does he cry a lot?” she asks. “I get the feeling he cries a lot.”We had a couple of iced teas between us, sweating in the humidity. Her husband had half the garage, some kind of snarling muscle car with her guts falling out all over. The other half was decorated with plants and crystals and stone buddhas and wall hangings that highlighted rainbow chakra points. This lady used to have a call in show on local cable. She had been in the paper. She sat before me in a bathing suit, fanning herself with a handful of junkmail.“I just want to squeeze him,” she says. “He’s a real turkey.”“What does he look like,” I ask. She considers.“You know,” she says, “my youngest daughter is about to get engaged.”“Congrats,” I say. “I called my son-in-law the day he bought the ring, knowing without knowing, and told him he’d better size that thing down. He called me a spooky old bitch.”She took a big gulp of her iced tea and drummed her nails against her forehead, frowning. Her grandbabies were in the pool out back. Screams and splashing over a steady cicada buzz. Heat rose in waves on her freshly paved driveway. “He’s in a relationship,” she says. “He’s not ready to leave yet.”“Oh,” I say.“He’s sad all the time,” she says. “Feels like he has to see it through.”“Oh,” I say. “His eyes, though,” she says. “Goddamn.”“Oh?” I ask.“Bluest you’ve ever seen,” she says. “Like you’d drown happy.”***
When the divorce was done I took a trip out west. Found myself in the tourist part of a California town. Mexican restaurants and breweries and things. Thumping baseballs at a place near the beach, a batting cage. They weren’t coming fast enough. I turned the speed up, up, up. Each crack of the bat a release I didn’t know I needed. Step in, hips before hands, follow through on that swing. My hands hurt, after. I found the third one because what the hell, I was on vacation with money to blow and there is not a single thing anyone could tell me that would surprise me anymore. She had a little shop at the end of the pier, a real tourist trap. I was probably better off firing money into those old Zoltar machines. The lady was dressed all in black, like you’d expect these people would be. She had some kind of accent that felt Romanian but was more likely fake. She looked haunted as shit. “You have aura,” she says. “Psychic aura.”“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”“It’s purple,” she says. “Tinged with white.”Something that might interest you to know is that I didn’t bring you up to any of these people. The psychics, I mean. Part of rolling in there like hit me, motherfucker is daring a stranger to tell you about yourself without giving anything away. The trouble is that people are predictable. They want the holy trinity of prediction: love, wealth, health. So you could say that about anyone, the love thing. I could use a good word about health or wealth but I never get it because all they ever tell me about is you.“There’s this man,” she says. “Jesus,” I say. “Again?”“He’s going to be in the palm of your hand,” she says. She held her palm out. Without warning, she brought her other one down on it with a sharp SMACK. It made me jump.“He’s scared to get crushed,” she says.“I’ll hold my applause,” I say.***
There is a lady I see sometimes, on a Zoom call. I found her online. She has a big thundering laugh and platinum blonde hair and very thin eyebrows. She swears a lot and calls me hun and tells me I am not crazy; that you do, in fact, exist. You were the first thing she saw about me. I frowned at my laptop and stonewalled her. “He’s in your energy, hun,” she says. “Ohhh, he’s coming.”“But my wealth,” I say.“Hm,” she says. “You’re going to get a promotion. In about two months.”Sure enough. “But my health,” I say.“Fix your guts,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”Sure enough.She describes you exactly like the first guy did, and then some. Tells me what you look like—That hair! That build! That smile!—how sweet and funny you are, how you talk and talk and talk. Tells me about your big goofy feet and your kind eyes. How I’ll know you anywhere, when you finally get here. She lights up when she talks about you. Says one day I will email her with a picture, and she will get to say a big fat fucking I TOLD YOU SO. “When,” I say.“Soon enough,” she says. “These things happen in perfect time.”She takes my money, keeps the faith. I pay her when I want to visit you. You’re not just data, now. You’re a composite sketch, someone I could describe to a police department (are you a criminal? Nobody ever says anything bad about you.) I wonder if you are just someone that everyone wants to hear about—the sweet, the funny, the eyes. Love stories recycled for a fool. “Big feet,” she says, cackling. “Lucky girl.”***
Two years after the divorce, I took a trip out east. I ate slices of pizza dripping with grease and bummed around the East Village until I found a tiny shop. Hole in the wall with a big obvious sign. No bigger than a closet. Two chairs, a big blanket covering the wall with a zodiac wheel on it. Incense smell. Told myself it would be the last time, though, of course, it never is. The guy draped himself over his chair and pulled tarot cards. He told me the wrong interpretations. I know, because I pull them myself. “Oh,” he says. “There’s a man.” “Bullshit,” I say.“There’s always a man,” he says.Logically, I know that he is a grifter. Most of them probably are. But I’m compelled, now. It’s like I can’t stop. Love stories are a drug I can’t quit; just one more fix, one more fix. I’m a sucker for a future that may never come.“He hasn’t shown up yet,” he says, “because you have a block.”“Oh,” I say.“I can help you get rid of it,” he says.“Oh,” I say. “Oh, I’m sure.”“There’s a darkness in your heart,” he says. “You’re faithless.”I’m tempted to believe him. It’s easier to think that it’s my fault, somehow. That I am undeserving of the love I want. The stupid part about this psychic thing, about playing chicken with fate, is that you’re living in the anticlimax. That if these things ever come—the bad you prepared for, the good that sustained you—you will only say, oh, okay. And if they don’t come—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You survive just the same.“Five hundred,” he says.“No,” I say, and leave.***
The day I sat my ex down and told him I wanted a divorce was like any other. There wasn’t anything special about it. It was just a day. We went to work and came home and I told him. I don’t remember the weather. March, it was March. So the weather could have been anything, really. I don’t remember what I ate. I don’t remember feeling much of anything. Except sad, I think. I was really sad.“Why,” he asked.“We’re not in love anymore,” I said.“Oh,” he said.He didn’t fight me on it. There was the love thing, and then the kids thing. The hard stop. The way he deserves them, if anyone on earth deserves them it’s him and I was never going to be the one to give that to him. We loved each other enough to let go. “What do you want,” he said.I almost choked on it. It felt too big an ask.“I want fucking fireworks,” I said.He considered for a moment.“Does that even exist?” he asked.I don’t know who I felt more sorry for. Him, for not believing. Or me, for wanting to. But I said that six whole months before seeing that first guy, the menthol guy. And buddy took my hands and, without knowing a single thing about me, told me one day I’d have them—the fireworks. Maybe you think I am stupid, or naïve. But maybe you could forgive me, too, for needing to know I had good reason to make my life go BOOM.***
There is about as much chance of me getting that fireworks kiss as seeing a UFO. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. That I’m rooting for it. The alien, I mean. I want to stare that octopus motherfucker down and know, somewhere, somehow, that you do exist. That one day you’ll light up the night sky, too. October 6, 2025
Fiction
PILE DRIVE ME INTO THE EARTH by Thora Dahlke
Althea Downs spends all summer break in her bedroom. Through the pivot roof window, the sun deep fries her no matter where she sits. She drinks berry-kale smoothies and listens to macabre podcasts that give her strange dreams about swimming pools full of blood. She showers at midnight and sweats through the entire night, wakes up cocooned in sheets so soaked you’d think the scale would finally plunge below 100. It does not. She thinks about killing herself, but only casually. This is her tenderest hobby, lazy and indulgent, she spoils it like a rescue. It’s not really death she craves so much as unbirthing herself. She’d like to root out each trace of her existence and unbecome. But dying doesn’t do that, nothing does, once you’ve been alive you can’t escape that fact, so suicide is only a recreational pastime, a little romantic reverie that softens the worst edges of her existential ennui. She would like to be transported out of her body and into something grand, but she’s scared of going into the real world. She hates her knees. She hates the bumps on her skin, the length of her fingers, how her body smells. Summer, which should be stunning and memorable, sneaks away into the night and her heart atrophies. In September, she moves into her college dorm and meets Pilvi. Pilvi is from Finland but speaks with no trace of a foreign accent. She adds liquorice-infused honey to her liquorice tea and eats salmiakki pastilles out of a black and white chequered paperboard box. Althea isn’t sure if she’s satirising her Finnish identity through exaggeration or if this is all genuine. She also isn’t sure if a potential distinction would even matter. She has tightly permed blonde hair and a half sleeve of tattoos. Right above her elbow are two black birds mid-flight, which she explains to be ravens from Norse mythology. On the other side of her arm, there’s Moomintroll surrounded by flowers. She’s reading a book about healing your inner child. The cover is pale green with a border of daisies. It feels ironic to read this book before you’re even done with college. Althea still feels like a child, outside as much as inside. But maybe if she does as the book instructs, her body will catch up and finally grow some tits.‘How is it?’ Althea asks.Pilvi looks towards her and, after Althea nods at the book, says, ‘Readable.’ ‘Does your inner child need a lot of healing?’ ‘My childhood was staggeringly non-traumatic,’ she says. ‘The worst thing that happened was when I saw a lynx eat a fox in our garden.’‘That sounds gory.’‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But that’s nature.’ Pilvi is studying economy psychology and isn’t going to be a therapist, but Althea imagines her as one anyway. She’d either be awful or really quite good, all depending on whether patients would feel judged enough to change their behaviour. Althea’s childhood was offensively non-traumatic as well. Guiltily, she sometimes daydreams that something awful happened to her—her softball coach, who always paid special attention to her, grooming her or some creepy stranger pushing her into a cinema restroom stall to molest her or her parents’ old Toyota somersaulting off a gravel road and tattooing the seatbelt to her chest. But everything was stable and safe and she did well in school and wasn’t the first or last to get her period and yet she feels wrong and scared and disgusting and sometimes it’d be nice if she could say she feels all of those things because of X. ‘I find pop psychology interesting,’ Pilvi says. ‘That’s why I’m reading it.’ Sunday night of their first week, they agree that they want college to be unforgettable, so they make bucket lists for the first year. Althea stares at the lined page in her journal for two minutes before she grabs her phone and starts googling bucket list ideas and what to put on bucket list and bucket list 100 items. A lot of the suggestions are very stupid: dye your hair, be a bridesmaid, make soap. Making soap cannot seriously be a life goal. Practise yoga, learn to surf, eat frog legs. Yuck. And Althea doesn’t think she really wants to learn to surf, nor bungee jump, snorkel, skydive, rock climb, or one of the other extreme sports that are apparently mandatory bucket list additions. Everyone wants to write a book and see the Northern Lights. The wedding industry also makes frequent contributions. She recognises that this—looking at what other people want to engender her own wants—disrupts the entire point. The fact that she can’t by herself think of anything specific that she wants is depressing. And it’s not that she wants nothing. She regrets that she wasted this summer, feels like that’s what she’s done with her entire life, and she wants to do better now. That’s why they’re making these lists. But does she really want to go vegan for a month or did she just see it on someone else’s bucket list? Does she actually want to go to Disney World? She doesn’t even remember watching Disney movies as a kid. Have sex, she finally writes. This desire is born more from a need to fill a void than for wanting the thing itself. Sex will probably be fine, decent, but more importantly, she will no longer be a virgin, which feels embarrassing in a deep, absolute way. Like Cain’s mark, her own failure smeared across her forehead. Other than that, she can only think of vague shit like: stop being a loser and do something cool. Pilvi has fifteen points on her list. She wants to ace all her classes, get an eyebrow piercing, and do molly. ‘Have you ever?’ she asks. Her expression, when she looks at Althea, is impressively blank. She sucks on a salmiak liquorice. ‘No,’ Althea says. She has not done any drugs, not even weed. She adds molly to her own list because it seems romantic and adventurous, even though she has no idea how she’d acquire it.‘What else is on yours?’ Pilvi asks. ‘Have sex,’ she says. ‘Dress up for Halloween.’ That sounds lame when she says it. ‘Like—something hot, you know?’ ‘Oh yeah. Like a playboy bunny?’ ‘Something like that,’ she says. She imagines herself in something appallingly slutty, fishnet tights and a glitter leotard with a plunging V-neck, sleek heels and hot pink lipstick. In the fantasy, she gets gloriously drunk and she’s so charming, so funny, everyone likes her and she’s not afraid of anything, no longer the girl who locked herself in her bedroom all summer, no, she’s alluring, she’s hot, she’s so fuckable and nothing hurts and she loses her virginity in a threesome and life is finally happening, life is finally larger than her loneliness and dread, life is finally—here.
***
Five weeks into the autumn term, Pilvi buys MDMA from a junior named Kyle. Google says it can trigger extremely high fevers, liver failure, kidney failure, heart failure, convulsions, cardiac arrest, and more. Now there’s a bucket list, Althea thinks darkly. Google also says it has proven successful in treating PTSD, so how’s that for healing your inner child? She puts on make-up in preparation, even though they’re going to get high in their dorm room. She wears a dark red lipstick and brown mascara. Pilvi changes into black sweatshorts and a matching sports bra before she crosses her legs on the carpeted floor. Her socks have little pizza slices on them. Sharing the first pill feels religious. Althea puts one half on Pilvi’s tongue and Pilvi feeds her the other half. Then they both have a long sip of the same can of cherry blossom LaCroix through green straws. Pilvi closes her eyes and lies down on the floor. The effects crawl closer until they’re suddenly just there, blaring through Althea’s nervous system. Strangely, she feels her mouth move into the shape of a big smile. Everything in the room—the scratched-wood single beds and decorative pillows, the storage boxes and paper bin, the neat row of liquorice boxes on Pilvi’s side of the desk—suddenly has an aura. All of it glows faintly. When Althea looks at Pilvi, she’s kind of glowing too. She wishes they’d gone out for this—outside, the world must be so beautiful: all the fallen leaves crisp and the colour of old pennies and gingerbread cookies, girls in knee socks and miniskirts, fuzzy candyfloss clouds on the jammy sunset sky. And everyone is beautiful and lovely, everyone is worthy of attention, Althea wants to talk to them and touch their hands and smile, smile the way she’s smiling now, her heart satiated and overripe. She puts her hand on Pilvi’s knee and it feels weirdly good; her palm tingles and she wants to touch her harder, dig in her fingertips and leave a mark. She wants Pilvi to also touch her. Maybe with her mouth. Pilvi has been talking about one of her professors, Oonagh Bartlett, nursing her own obsessive crush for weeks. She lectures with nearly mechanical precision, smells like shea butter, wears her box braids in a top bun, and is happily married. Pilvi wants to have sex with her anyway; she’s even added it to her bucket list. Althea asked if this had anything to do with some unhealed inner child trauma, and Pilvi laughed. Pilvi’s laugh is very nice, it has a glow to it as well. It always bursts out of her like a champagne cork. Althea doesn’t have any professors she would like to have sex with. She also has no classmates she’d like to have sex with, so progress on her bucket list has been slow. But now they’re high on molly (so she can tick that off) and she’s thinking about foxes and lynxes and Pilvi’s mouth (which is beautiful). Her fears have been sandpapered into a small, smooth pebble which she can easily ignore. Her awe is wide, her hope so raw. Her hand moves up Pilvi’s thigh and Pilvi blinks slowly at her, her glowy eyelashes flutter against her cheekbones, her glowy collarbones are begging to be touched just like everything in Althea’s body is begging to be touched. She remembers that she could die from this and it’s okay. She wants to tell Pilvi that she is so beautiful but she just kisses her instead. Pilvi melts further into the floor and kisses her back, fingers tangled loosely at the back of her nape. This is what Althea should’ve been doing all summer: ridden her bike to the beach and gone to house parties and flirted with everyone. She should’ve been kissing every single girl that looked at her, spritzed herself with a new perfume sample every day, waded waist-deep into the cold water, hotboxed a shed with her best friend and shotgunned weed, but she didn’t have a best friend, she didn’t even have a close-enough friend, she was too afraid to talk to anyone who could see her. She would’ve made such a good ghost. Maybe one day. Her tongue moves lazily in Pilvi’s mouth; she bites her lower lip. She licks against her teeth. Pilvi breathes out this little hurt-animal sound and rocks upwards, sweatshorts bunching between their bodies, and it feels so good and gorgeous. Althea touches her belly, her waist, and keeps kissing her. If the MDMA in her bloodstream curdles now and paralyses her heart, it really wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen. September 19, 2025
Fiction
COAGULOID by Hank O’Neill
It tastes so god I can’t hav another bite I say — and the hole of evrybody jus shuts up like oh is she about to stop? Loud one second and then gasping like is this reel? I hear somone literallay go holy fuk is that the end of Mis Plasteek? They’re holding out ther phone recording as they say, Guys I can’t beleev I’m catching this on video, plees like and subscribe.Meenwile I see the Produser behind the curtain mouthing to me: okay nice, now milk it. Which is jus wat we rehursed. The guy with the phone is holding it for a selfee so he can be in the shot. Guys this is reel, this is monewmental, He says. Though some person next to him yaps, Hey I din’t buy tikets so ur dumass could blok my vew with a camra. And so on.The Produser’s noding his hed in reel satisfakshun. I giv him a wink like oh yah we totallay get each other. We kno wats happenin.He offen says to me, Sweethar, make them go wow this is reelly happenin and/or I din’t buy first row tikets for nothing, like it’s the experieuns of a liftime, etsetra etsetra.Well, this is wat I do rite about then: I hold the las bit of plastek up to my mouth and bulg out my cheeks like nope I’m dun. Maybe I burp a litle. Maybe I wip some reel blod from my mouth but don’t bothr to cleen it. I look ofstage and say, Sir I don’t think I can do this anymor, even as the Produser's givin me the thumbs up from behin the curtan. He yells somthin loud then, or makes the dogs bark. People go, Did you hear that? Is she bein forsed to do this?But of corse what the Produser said/did was jus nonsens, jus part of the show. And thos dogs by the way arn’t mad at all.It’s arond heer I shake a litle. Like I’m scared. Like I’m gonna brake or apolagize to the audiunse — Hey sorre folks, I been so rite up til now, but I jus can’t do this anymor. With reel teers in my eyes. Ha ha. Jk.I remembr one time durin this part a guy tride to hop on stage saying to me, I’m Dad! I’m ur Dad! And it throwed me jus for a sec. Like my chest went hollo. I din’t kno this guy. I new that. But he got up to me. He was rite in fron of my fase, lookin in my eyes. He hopped over the fens and burs up onstage. Then he grabed my arm and said, Look at what they dun to u. For a momen I din’t kno ware I was.My litl sweehar, He said, holding my hand. I wasn’t evn breething. It was the way he said it, like in a dreem.I’ll tak u away, He said.Then the securty delt with him, carreed him away. I don’t kno wat I wud hav don. I jus sat ther, not evn moving. The Produser whisper-yelld over to me, Hey! Remember las bite!Wat? I thoght. I din’t evn kno ware I was. Oxigen! The Produser yelld. And I took a deep breath and coffed it bak out. It felt like the air got stuk insid me. I was liteheded. Teers wer fillin my eyes.Wat is hapnin? I herd someon say.I jus couldn stop my eyes from waterin. My wrist was throbin. Everythin was spinnin around. Then the lites cut and nobody coud see a thing.Or maybe my eyes were shut. I don’t kno. I remembr bein in the makeup room with the Produser whisper-yellin somethin I couldn heer. Aparenly they weeled me ofstage and had to run the defribrilator. I droold all over my shirt.Someon yelled from ouside I stil love you, Mis Plasteek! Do you kno ware you are? The Produser kept askin me, Do you kno? Then I herd the Produser’s ring and him going Helo as he answrd a call. He stepped away. I reely was in the makeup room—I saw this as I opend my eys. But wat? I kep thinking. The plastek was still on the plate in fron of me. I neerly brought it up to my mouth, looking at my fork, but I stopped because I smelled burnt sugar in the air. A cake was sittin on the counter with burnt waxy sparklers sunk in the top. The Produser was already eatin a slice with his fingers, lickin it off the tips.And the door was wide open. Not like open-open—craked—like a mouth almos don chewin, breething a litl thru the lips. I stared at it.The Produser was still talkin on the phone. His ring was buzzin again but he din’t pick up. He was sayin things like no she’s fine, no I got it, etsetra etsetra.Meenwile my head felt as tho someon was slamin it in the door—empty and bam, bam, bam. Like my skul was craking and my body was froze up, all pumped ful like a mannekin, and all I could feel everythin pushin around inside me.But I was on the other side of the door alredy. Throwin it all out of my mouth, moovin down the hall, not in my mind.And my hands were on the weels. The cold air was bushin pas my cheeks. I herd him call from behin me-–Hey! Com back heer! But I was far.My face nevr looked like it had befor, tryin to hold back my excitemen.Because that’s when the walls of the hallway backdrop lift, all the furnitur gets pushed off by the crew, and evryon remembrs I’m stil on stage. Then the Produser weels me center—my body tips.And the audiunse lets loose my favorite part.
September 17, 2025
Interviews & Reviews
DAVE FITZGERALD RECOMMENDS: Brandi Homan’s ‘Burn Fortune’, Kristin Garth’s ‘Daddy’, and Danielle Chelosky’s ‘Pregaming Grief’
Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 Western musical starring Jean Seberg, Clint Eastwood, and Lee Marvin, was a historic commercial flop, by turns both mindbogglingly strange, and mind-numbingly dull in its depiction of an anonymous, gold rush era mining camp cycling through the increasingly corruptive stages of insular capitalism. While its atonally sing-songy, borderline nihilistic theme reprises (many, many times over, burrowing into your brain and simply refusing to resolve), we watch as some 400 men invest their lucky-struck earnings into six agreeably trafficked women until their No Name tent City grows into a hedonist boomtown—a collection of 20-some-odd saloons that never sleep, and through which the men’s money can change hot hands in closed-loop perpetuity. Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well look no further than my 2021 review of Brandi Homan’s Burn Fortune, the first title I ever read from femcel/horror-centric small press darling CLASH Books.Burn Fortune is a small wonder; an exercise in concision that nonetheless contains worlds. Written in tight, punchy bursts of poetic wit and poignantly relatable teen angst, it reads like the highly curated diary of a precocious young woman in a hell of a spot. Through the sharp, tilt-shift lens of the smalltown 1990’s midwest—a place which author Brandi Homan renders painfully (and at times hilariously) authentic via deadpan descriptions of flag corps politics, beer runs to the Kum & Go, and hot summers spent detasseling corn—we get to know June, a girl with the kind of nebulous big dreams that only small-town teenagers know how to have; that sense that there has to be more of something, anything, somewhere out there, and that you’re surely destined for all of it if you could only figure out where to go. It’s not until the local librarian introduces her to the films of Jean Seberg (an Iowa native who escaped to France to become the iconic star of such films as Breathless and Saint Joan) that June begins to think more deeply about what she wants, and how to get it.The sections in which she watches Seberg’s films could almost pass for Live Tweeting sessions, and her by-turns entranced and exasperated commentary injects her increasingly desperate circumstances (abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, unwanted pregnancy) with a brilliant levity that will make you want to watch right along with her (I for one will be checking out Paint Your Wagon ASAP). And while the thing this book maybe does best is depict the ways in which even the smartest people can find themselves hemmed in on all sides by seemingly inescapable circumstance—by a town, or a house, or a family, or even a single destructive person—what June finds in Jean (and specifically in her portrayal of Joan of Arc) is the will to break free of it all. To defy fate, raise high her battle flag, and fly like the prairie wind, because small towns hold on the tightest—to young women most of all—and absolutely no one gets out without a fight.I wrote that short review nearly four years ago, in what now feels like a much simpler time, but upon revisiting Burn Fortune’s blighted, broken heartland for this piece, I found that it hit differently under our present banner of red, white, and blue. For all her determination, the thought of June actually breaking free of all that’s tying her to the stake of smalltown, USA feels like a deeply optimistic reading—an astronomical possibility on par with Seberg’s own selection by Otto Preminger out of 18,000 hopeful young actresses vying to play his Joan (a rescue which, by all accounts, still left her beholden to the whims of a tyrannical male authority). The East is sinking. The West is burning. The government is a kleptocracy, and the economy feels increasingly like a game of three-card monte. Maybe June had a chance back in the DIY riot grrrl ’90s, but the futility of the future we now know waits for her comes through in countless devilish details, from her boyfriend’s hours spent duct-taped to an exercycle, to a perfect, microcosmic chapter in which she and her friends cruise “The Loop” on a routine Saturday night, jockeying for position as they mindlessly circle the main drag of their go-nowhere town. “That’s what being a good American is, right?” June muses on their endless, aimless plight. “Be better! Be better all the time!”Homan’s ending is open to interpretation, and I was certainly feeling better about America in 2021 than I am today, so far be it for me to claim any certainty as to what June can or can’t hope to accomplish. But by the time she sequesters herself in an underground culvert to light candles and recite spells—pictures of Seberg taped to the walls—it’s fair to wonder if she’s built herself a chrysalis, or a tomb. It’ll take more than a still-legal-back-then abortion or a fresh start in the next town over to truly outrun her devastating lot. No matter where you go within the invisible borders of the American patriarchy, there you fucking are. Even Jean took her talents to Europe (and even that only helped for so long). “Around here the only way to speak is to leave and if you leave you burn.”For those looking to truly opt out, allow me to pivot to Kristin Garth’s Daddy (from the ever-pugnacious envelope pushers at Anxiety Press), a physically discomfiting collection liable to make any man who’s browsed PornHub in the last twenty years squirm in his boxer briefs. Wielding the second person voice like a VR empathy trainer, Garth slathers her readers in a child pageant’s-worth of Lolital signifiers—bows and hearts, glitter and gloss, plaid skirts and pigtails—corseting us inside the minds and behind the eyes of female bodies we are almost exclusively accustomed to ogling at a safe and powerful remove. Whether building exquisite, tangled poetry from the inner monologue of a babyfaced sex worker bought and stabled for her ability to cry on command (“The Cry Shot”), or avenging the trauma of twin rollerskating ingenues turned sister-act strippers (“Twinkles”), Daddy cannonballs into the fetishization of girlhood with the no-fucks flagrancy of a trenchcoated pervert crashing the ballpit at a Chuck-E-Cheese, outragedly demanding a deeper examination of the semiotics of smut; of what so many get away with when the lights are lowest, and why.Nowhere is this truer than in Plaything—the novella that makes up the book’s second half—which centers around Melinda, a nominally enslaved young woman who is kept in a state as close to that of a living sex doll as one man can arrange for her. Cloistered in the kind of princess bed, fast fashion, Hello Kitty-print prison one might associate with a “barely legal” OnlyFans feed, Melinda is monitored 24/7, and dresses, speaks, and behaves according to the exacting specifications of her misogynist malefactor, existing in a kind of infantilized stasis for his pleasure alone. It’s a chilling scenario to see spelled out, and the degree to which it mirrors so much familiar content on the X-rated web renders bold, lascivious text any remaining subtext regarding the 21st century porn-poisoned male brain—the desire for both absolute physical control over, and absolute emotional detachment from, the female body.Elsewhere, “The Plan” chronicles a daughter’s lifelong pursuit of physical beauty and runway fame in hopes of someday crossing paths with her deadbeat movie star dad, an unwitting, uncaring lothario who proves all too eager to fail her spectacularly anew. “Con Man” recounts in excruciating detail a Rubicon moment in which an aspiring screenwriter must decide exactly how much of herself she’s willing to give up for a shot at the bigtime, and reckon with the instantaneous, irreversible damage she’ll endure no matter which sliding door she chooses. And taking these casual violations into the spiritual realm, the title story unfolds through a series of e-mails sent by a rape victim from her LDS college to her devout Mormon father back in Florida (where most of the book’s stories take place), an evolution of increasingly unhinged reports which reveal her betrayal and exploitation at the hands of men at every turn. All of these stories take square aim at the impossible power dynamics baked into our socio-sexual bedrock—the master’s tools that will absolutely never dismantle the master’s house—and the thoughtless entitlement with which men at every rung of authority and success can and will view women as their rightful spoils, offering a leg up only if they get to cop a feel along the way.I’ve read Daddy twice now, and I don’t believe there’s a good man to be found anywhere among these cum- and tear-stained pages. Indeed, that Plaything’s Melinda ultimately escapes into a lesbian relationship seems to suggest the possibility that, as far as Garth is concerned, there may well be none left to be found. While we’ve undoubtedly made strides under 3rd wave feminism with the subversive reclamation of stripping and the rise of ethical porn, Daddy raises real and fair questions about the academic nature of this kind of empowerment, and the ways in which it can bounce back to bite real sex workers just trying to survive inside institutional sexism’s echo chamber. For so many of these women, the fact remains, men don’t really care why they sell their bodies, so long as they do it. We can always make it work to our advantage. This may sound like polemic, but I’m not even claiming to be above it. It’s a banal, pushbutton temptation the internet hucks at me every day. As Chuck Klosterman famously noted over a decade ago, “the biggest problem in my life is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.”With all that said, Daddy feels like a true blow against the empire. What Garth has done here, brazenly and without compromise, is overload the whole damn system. Her ruthless commingling of adult and underage imagery, taboo and perversity, wanting to look and knowing you should look away, cumulates to effect a kind of autoerotic short-circuitry; a flaccid self-loathing. Her authorial voice is the literary equivalent of your girlfriend finding your browser history and screaming at you—“So this is what you like, you sick fuck?!”—until you die of shame. Even the book’s title and teenybop trapper-keeper cover art were enough to make me feel uncomfortable reading it in public. The fact is, none of this is new. Men have spent the past century building an objectification ecosystem that learns, commodifies, and enables our worst behaviors, and until we take responsibility for dismantling it (a prospect that looks less promising today than it has at any point in my lifetime) it will remain too big to fail. Considering everything that’s working against her, it’s a testament to Garth’s writing that she can still find ways to make us blush.As for those still looking to work within all that the patriarchy hath wrought, I’m not sure any writer has nailed the experience with as much honest, and self-aware precision as Danielle Chelosky, whose diaristic Pregaming Grief (my long-overdue first read from small press bellwether Short Flight/Long Drive) details her coming to terms, at the tender cusp of her twenties, with her own conflicted masochism. Torn between two older men—her manipulatively needy, hopelessly immature, yo-yoing heroin-addict first love (direct-addressed as “You” throughout), and an obdurately withholding, overtly condescending, all-too-familiar brand of “telling it like it is” aspiring comedian (Andrew)—Chelosky offers herself up as the sacrificial embodiment of Carson McCullers’s timeless relational paradigm—that of the lover and the beloved—and makes a strong case for the nature of human desire as little more than a pendular dialectic between the two. It’s strange to write about these presumably very real guys in such judgmental terms, but Chelosky is nothing if not cleareyed about exactly who and what they are, and her own complicated feelings for both of them. After centuries of men reducing all women to mothers and whores, she matter-of-factly flips that dichotomy on its head, making plain as day its unavoidable cognate: that all men must then be children or johns.Whilst ping-ponging back and forth between these two lunkheads, Chelosky forges a fledgling career in music journalism, tests the limits of her alcoholism, and does a lot of driving around with her bestie Quinn, at first trekking to well-known vistas like Joshua Tree and Death Valley (both places already being ravaged by climate change), and once the pandemic descends transitioning to shuttered prisons, defunct amusement parks, and even the faithless remnant of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA. The more of these long-distance interstate sojourns she takes, the more she starts to feel like a video game avatar butting up against the invisible boundaries of its world map, looking for some elsewhere that simply isn’t there. Though she has all the freedom she could want—all the practical freedom that June and Melinda long for—she still finds herself always and inevitably returning to the places and people from whence she came.“I felt suffocated by a nameless grief” she notes at one point. “This inexplicable feeling of ending,” and through her trespassing journeys into abandonment and decay, coupled with her dystopian descriptions of New York under Covid lockdown, and her dedicated attachment to outdated media formats, her tone begins to convey a palpable sense of lived-in doom—of an already-gone world that she somehow both misses, and never really knew. It’s in many ways the same grief we see in the black parade of album anniversaries (a trend for which, somewhat amusingly, Chelosky’s chief publisher Stereogum is directly responsible) and celebrity deaths that daily clog our interconnected plexus of screens—the collective, performative mourning of the past that feels communally engineered to continue into the future in perpetuity, like some hellish Oscars In Memoriam eternally regurgitating the nostalgia of how much cooler and realer everything used to be. But when everything becomes nostalgia, then soon enough all of life starts to feel like cosplay—a dissociating from our present reality for fear that there’s nothing left to achieve, or even hope for—that anything worth doing has all already been done.The same could be said for the numerous men she meets around the margins of her two bigtime loves—a string of largely interchangeable music industry bros and app swipes that only serve to reinforce her disinterest in her own generation’s algorithmic romantic compromise. ExPat Press honcho Manuel Marrero observed in his own phenomenal review of this book that “people used to like things in a way they don’t anymore” and in addition to the physical books and albums Chelosky so clearly treasures, those “things” very much include “each other.” While her peers often present as a shallow cavalcade of responsible(ish) drinkers curating themselves through detached, disposable hookups, she repeatedly, and belligerently disingratiates herself from their ranks, determined to chase a more permanent, transcendent attachment through the self-abnegation of submissive, rough sex and the consumptive void of blackout, like some questing, flagellant Mystic. “I writhed in never-ending hysterical fits” she laments, twisting at the ends of all her fraying ropes, “wishing to escape my body, this city, the whole world.”Something the book explores as well as any narrative work I know on the subject, is the necessary tradeoff between trust and danger within a mutual S&M arrangement. Chelosky is generous and fearless when it comes to sharing the details of hers and Andrew’s sex life—a thrilling, and occasionally frightening affair that hews much closer to the reckless violence of Año Bisiesto than the contractual fantasies of something like 50 Shades. Her acceptance of risk—her need for it, even—is part of what makes it work for her. “I regretted everything I did the minute I did it, I deserved a punishment for it, for just existing. I wanted to get perpetually drunk so I could be liberated from this prison of insecurity, no longer having to be aware of or responsible for myself and my inevitable mistakes” confesses one passage in this relentlessly quotable book (I must have copied down at least 50 while making notes for this article, often snapping pictures of whole pages for reference). “I felt ashamed of the videos I watched when I was alone. The degradation I desired felt so antithetical to the feminist beliefs I held” admits another. Where Daddy adamantly refuses to allow for this kind of counterintuitive ecstasy, Chelosky’s journey of abject self-discovery argues for a different kind of personal and ideological freedom. Andrew exhibits, pretty inarguably, an unapologetic chauvinism (I’ll never forget the anecdote in which he mansplains why her choice of favorite Beatles song is wrong), but he also proves capable of tenderness and affection and, most importantly, seems to get what it is she needs from him, even if he’s not always willing to give it. Regardless of all she ostensibly knows and feels to the contrary, for her “A place of pain [is] just another name for a home.”There is so much resignation here, for an author so young—so much hard-won truth and understanding of the limits of human relationships, and the very real possibility that to fully love anyone is to spend your whole life overcorrecting for how you first loved, or failed to love someone else. I’ve barely touched on “You” so far, but his presence in, and influence upon her worldview is pervasive, bordering on omnipresent. For anyone who’s ever held onto someone too hard, for too long—or conversely, had someone refuse to let them go—Pregaming Grief will carry a visceral weight. The neurotic ghosts of memory and regret. The constant replaying and reimagining and repenting of all that might have been. “I’d learned the hard way that getting older only made things worse” begins my favorite line in the book. “I was an expert at waiting out my problems until they ruined my life.” If you know, you know, and Danielle Chelosky knows.Indeed, for as much as I wanted to examine Pregaming Grief within the same feminist framework as the two books above, it ultimately forced me to expand my thinking. For as much as I kneejerk loathed Andrew and “You” and felt depressed by the tired, ubiquitous tropes of modern manhood they represent, I was also regularly mortified by moments of recognition in them both—in Andrew’s pop culture didacticism and dogged resistance to vulnerability, and in “You”’s willful naivete and cowardly, druggy self-sabotage. And for as much as I wanted better for Chelosky (whatever judgy, paternalistic vision for her that might entail—yet another blindspot writing this piece made me confront), even more relatable were her own patterns of rejection and subsumption—of the contradictory desires to be someone’s “nothing” and their “everything at the same time”—the lover, and the beloved. I can sit here wanting these guys to do better, but Chelosky herself might well contend that they’re both already doing their best (frustrating as it might be). In the end it’s clearly far more than just these two privileged, flawed men, or even the patriarchy under which they were forged, that’s hemming her in. It’s the pain of existence itself.So where do we go from here? What do we do with all this baggage piling up between us, and around us, and upon us—saturating our brains and our neural net of feeds—filling our country up to its glass ceiling, sandbagging its invisible walls, and spilling over its eroding edges from sea to shining sea? If Paint Your Wagon is any indicator, we may be out of good options; decamping from this No Name City and these rigged systemic structures may simply not be in those three Monte cards. For plucky Jean Seberg, after two hours of subpar musical numbers and chemistry-free love triangulations, the gold dries up, and the entire settlement literally sinks into the Earth—destabilized by an elaborate system of tunnels the male protagonists have dug in order to rob their fellow workers blind (how’s that for metacommentary?) Her cabin still stands, and Clint Eastwood sticks dutifully by, but as the rest of the prospectors pull up stakes and the principles bid their farewells, the film leaves an existential taste in the mouth—the nagging suspicion that, stay or go, there’s really nothing else to do but the same things they just did all over again—the master’s tools just waiting to rebuild in the next town over, and the next, and the next.So yes, it’s hard to feel as hopeful for June as I did four years ago. And yes, the U.S. is feeling more every day like a place we may need to escape (though Europe today is hardly the expat safe haven it once was). As she herself puts it, heartbreakingly, near the end of Burn Fortune, “It isn’t that I don’t want this it’s that what I want is something else and that is not this”—as shifty and vaguely tautological a summation as you’re likely to find of our National sexual politics in 2025. If she wriggles her way off the pyre, it’ll be a miracle deserving of Sainthood. I’d like to think she could find a friend like Melinda, someone to help her break free of men’s possessive, binary bindings. Or else one like Chelosky with whom she could roam the dying countryside, blasting cassettes and CD’s and chasing her own tortured version of peace; standing in the flames and “learn[ing] independence because [she] had no other choice.”
September 16, 2025
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
