• “The world and its martinis are mine!” Dwight Garner looks at martinis and the writers who love(d) them, including Patricia Highsmith (quoted), Karl Ove Knausgaard, and more. | Lit Hub Food (& Drink)

• KJ Dell’Antonia on the rules of literary magic. | Lit Hub Craft

• “To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort.” Alberto Toscano considers what “fascist” really means today. | Lit Hub Politics

• Beyond “how-to”: A reading list for understanding the “how-comes” of contemporary life. | Lit Hub Reading Lists

• Is ketamine therapy all it’s hyped up to be? | Lit Hub Science

• “The case might be made for Werner Herzog, in documentaries and features and novels, as the narrator of our time, or at least of his time.” Samuel Rutter on Herzog’s voice. | Dirt

• Penguin Random House has launched the Freedom of Expression Prize, which asks teens to write about a banned book that changed their life. | The Guardian

• On Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, “the longest, least-remembered Great American Novel.” | The New Yorker

• “To act at all today—in relation to communities, in relation to the climate—requires an embrace of one’s own insignificance in the larger scheme of things.” Jasmine Liu on Lydia Davis’s stories and politics. | The New Republic

• In the new issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Marguerite Bunce tells the story of a lost dog in rural France. | Dorothy Parker’s Ashes

• Nancy Conyers on her Aunt Helen’s wailing wall: “She helped me envision a day when I too would be able to travel to faraway places.” | The Keepthings

Also on Lit Hub: The recurring dreams of Roz Chast • Christopher Kennedy on defining prose poetry and working-class stories • Read from K-Ming Chang’s latest novel, Organ Meats

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Excerpted from I Must Be Dreaming by Roz Chast. Copyright © 2o23. Available via Bloomsbury.

I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

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Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

I was in the middle of a revision and absolutely convinced that this one was going to kill me. Slowly, painfully, a long, drawn-out death at the hands of weapons I’d created myself:  jagged plot holes, cuttingly sharp transitions, two-dimensional characters ready to wield blunt cliches in their quest to live a larger life.

It was the story of every revision I’ve ever done and I knew it, but I’d made it even worse this time, because this story had magic. Magic with internal logic, a system I’d built and created to lure my protagonist, Flair, into the kind of life-altering disaster she needed to change. Magic that had served the story—and therefore me—well. Until now.

Now it was screwing everything up. Things I needed to happen couldn’t. I was stuck.

Damnit, I texted my two writer buds. I’ve magicked myself into a fucking corner.

Their responses were simultaneous.

Use your wand.

Are you a witch or not, Hermione?

Very funny, kids. Thanks a lot. And yet…the more I thought about it….

It was exactly what I needed to hear.

If there is one rule of literary magic, it is that it must serve the story, not solve it. To do that, the magic needs limits. Rules. Mine did, and those rules were getting in Flair’s way, because that is what rules do. If they were getting in my way as well, that could only mean one thing. They were the wrong rules.

There’s a line we straddle as writers, made famous by variations on a tweet I see screenshotted regularly on Instagram: To the reader who complained because my novel about vampires on a submarine was “unrealistic”: sorry.

The joke is solid—vampires! Submarine! And yet the complaint might be valid too. If you’re going to put vampires on a submarine—and you can, you should, it’s actually quite logical and raises questions for me about vampires in space, because is that sunlight? What is day in that context? but I digress—if you’re going to put vampires on a submarine in all that nice undersea darkness, those things must transcend what readers know about our reality and take on a life of their own. They have to become real.

The story logic has to hold and the emotional glue has to stick and we have to care and worry about those vamps in their sub. And probably, because this is the way of both story and life, the fact of their vampire-ness has to become an additional problem for them to overcome, a barrier to what they want or must do to survive their journey and achieve or revise their goals.

Rules are what makes that happen. Rules, expectations, the laws of physics—those are the boundaries that create both lives and stories. Even if we declare that there are no rules, that’s a rule. In that world, some things can happen (fingers become sausages), and some things can’t (certainty of any kind).

Flair, stuck in her story, was hating those rules. Cursing her limited powers, her disappointing allies and most especially her supposedly magic Tarot deck, flat out refusing to do anything useful while she tried to find a way—any way—to get herself out of this mess unscathed.

I was stuck because my job wasn’t finished. The rules I’d made were still hazy and worse, I didn’t even know what Flair thought those rules were, or why, or whether she was right. Which meant I didn’t know who she was or, why she was who she was, or what she would really do once the thing that mattered to her most in the world was in danger of disappearing for good. And until I knew those things, she couldn’t know them, either.

In real life, the rules are always hazy. We’re hardly ever entirely certain what we believe, or why, or what we will do if we’re trapped on a submarine with a vampire or our fingers suddenly turn into hot dogs. The magic of a story—and the job of the witch who creates it—is to deliver that clarity.

I found myself in trouble along with Flair because I’d forgotten not just who made the rules (me) but more importantly, why. We can’t just make up any old rules (or change them when they become inconvenient). The writer’s job is to make the rules that force our character to transcend that moment of twisting and turning and beating her hands against a closed door and do something else. To make a choice that is not just possible, but inevitable.

Flair wanted her magic to fix the people around her. To make them do what she wanted them to do and want what she wanted them to want. After I got those texts demanding that I put on my big witch pants and do the work, I sat down at my desk and spent the next four hundred and fifty-seven hours cursing my limited powers, my disappointing allies and my own Tarot deck while going backwards and forwards and sideways in story time and story logic to give Flair what she thought she wanted and then show her what it meant.

My spell had to ensnare both Flair and the reader in the kind of magic in which the only things that can happen are the things that do and the only thing Flair can do is what she finally does—which is to accept that the only choices she can control are her own.

It sounds so easy when I put it like that. But every writer knows that fighting through all those words we put on the page in search of what we really meant to say with our keyboard as a sorry substitute for a wand is ridiculously difficult. But at least now I know the right thing to ask myself when the rules I’ve made have me backed into a corner and the magic isn’t happening and it feels like it never, ever will.

Are you a witch, or not?

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Playing the Witch Card by KJ Dell’Antonia is available via Putnam.

For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lying between the large rings of a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. This was the psychonautical equivalent of a three-star Anthology meal at the Fat Duck, or a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh by the Berliner Philarmoniker, if the meal were eaten standing up in an airplane toilet, the concert heard over the mêlée of Black Friday on Oxford Street.

Ketamine: special K.

“It’s a mong for end-stage burners,” said Palmer, techno DJ and medicinal gourmand. “I could play Abba and no one would clock it.”

“It’s a horse tranquilizer,” said my drug-naïve mum. “Those Thai soccer boys took too much and got stuck in a cave for days.” (She’d only heard about the Netflix documentary.)

“I think the rescue team gave them it to stop them panicking, Mum.”

“It’s a Swiss Army knife,” said an anesthetist colleague, “used off- label as an anti-inflammatory, for pain relief, for neuroprotection, as well as an anesthetic in surgery and critical care.”

I’d also read about anti-aging hacks in California “playing” with mega-doses that led to a complete collapse in space–time coherence, a few minutes stretching out to a “felt” century. I would be catheterized for the best part of an hour. It might be that the first human to live 5,000 years (me) had recently turned fifty and already had flattening arches and an arthritic hip.

These perspectives layered my ketamine “set”—my “priors,” to use the jargon of the neuroscientist, meaning the beliefs one holds before any experience has taken place, and the tendency for those beliefs to shape the experience itself.

The study was being conducted by Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research, an international leader, and one of the first groups to be established with seed money from the philanthropist/ investor/podcaster/author Tim Ferriss, of The Four-Hour Work Week, The Four-Hour Body and The Four-Hour Chef, fantasies of compression enabled, I imagined, by the 4,000 years he’d spent exploring these things in psychedelic space-time. I had just received the patient information sheet (PIS), following a two-hour interview with one of the research assistants that had covered my psychological history, my educational history, my relationship history, my drug and alcohol history. And this was just the pre-screen.

In the days to come I would have a formal clinical interview lasting several hours with a consultant psychiatrist. It made sense to be careful about who one loaded in the barrel of an MRI scanner and shot into unimagined realms. In most psychedelic trials there were general criteria for “healthy”: no history of suicidality, psychoses, bipolar, personality disorders or long-term drug addiction. And for this particular trial there were extra criteria: that I was both ketamine-naïve and hadn’t been near psychedelics in three months, the latter being why I had elected to make ketamine the first of my ten trips.

The PIS was long, detailing every stage of the investigation in language that was supposed to be accessible to the layman to ensure the study’s safe passage through the ethics committee. It didn’t begin promisingly: “Detecting synaptogenesis induced by Ketamine/ Dimethyltryptamine and motor learning using the tracer [11C] UCB-J in an integrated PET-fMRI paradigm.”

“The brain’s ability to reshape and make new connections during adulthood,” it continued, “is essential to our ability to learn new skills and form and access memories. This process, broadly described as neuroplasticity, can be disrupted by many different factors and is increasingly believed to be centrally involved in a number of mental health disorders and cognitive impairments.”

This related to the “synaptogenesis” part of the title. New experiences may be registered in the brain by the generation of dendritic spines which sprout, tree-like, on one end—the dendron—of the neuron. The language of neuroplasticity is infused with the metaphor of the tree: the sprouting is called “arborization” after the Latin; under high magnification the dendrites look like foliage.

New Age psychedelic therapists like the recently disgraced Françoise Bourzat take the metaphor a stage further, seeing in the images of tripping brains anatomical symbols of the plants or mycelial (fungal) networks that inspire them. To the more circumspect this might be no different from getting high and seeing the profile of Donald Trump’s quiff in wispy clouds.

Most neuroscientists would think of both as examples of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous sensory pattern. Bourzat’s gloss on ancient human-plant synergy works less well for ketamine, which has no botanical basis but was developed in 1962 in a Detroit lab owned by a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer: a little more difficult to romanticize than Mazatec mushrooms and Amazonian vines.

Neuroplasticity has for decades been one of the most popularized areas in neuroscience, long predating the current interest in psychedelics. “Rewiring” has become part of the vernacular of life coaches, football managers, schoolteachers and mobile apps. (One might describe its recent ubiquity as the “Joe Dispenza Effect,” after the chiropractor-turned-neuroplastic guru.)

Plasticity is seen as a “hack” allowing us to acquire new skills and knowledge, change old patterns or “priors,” re-think ourselves. (Today Joe’s tweet reads: “To create a new personal reality—a new life—we must create a new personality. We must become someone else.”) This mode of understanding makes it inevitable that plasticity and psychedelics are saddled together: two “new” instruments of improvement, passwords for the near-limitless possibilities of self-transformation, couched in the sexy-sounding language of neuroscience.

Keen to learn something of what might be about to happen to my brain, I run a Google search for “evidence of imaging of synaptogenesis.” It yields little. A few lead-in adverts (dictated by the engine’s plastic algorithm) for how to train your brain to give up sugar or “speak proper grammar,” then a low-res black and white clip lasting a few seconds that resembles the beginnings of cinema: dendrites like tiny forks of lightning across a night sky, appearing, then disappearing, then appearing again, until they stabilize. This was arborisation alright, but in larval jellyfish.

In clinical neurology, the field I work in, there’s a different emphasis on neuroplasticity. It’s understood not as “growth” or “transformation,” but as the mechanism of repair or compensation after devastating injury. The tone is different too, of course: more circumspect, less certain, at least as far as hard evidence goes. The effects of plasticity are seen clearly on brain scans taken at different intervals after a traumatic injury, for example, but its mechanisms, and the extent of its capacity to restore the injured brain, remain vague. At present there are no commonly used drug interventions with the power to significantly promote it.

But it remains a term in daily use. Every trauma patient will, after they are sufficiently reoriented in space and time, be given a basic lesson in the brain’s ability to heal itself: that the restoration of lost speech, a paralyzed leg, amnesia, an altered personality, depend on old pathways being restored, or compensatory pathways being forged. Some patients make complete recoveries, many don’t. Most clinicians cite two years as the length of the window in which such changes might be seen in the adult brain. A few make it longer, three to five years; a few are more conservative, confining the window to eighteen months.

In the absence of detailed evidence, this becomes a matter of convention rather than science. It’s also clinically strategic, something to give the patient and her family hope, the motivation to rehab, to keep emotional devastation at bay for as long as they remain “in” the window. In this context plasticity is often more a matter of faith than science. It’s also a way of distracting everyone (including the clinicians) from the terrible reality of how little can be done medically for the patients, how a significant percentage of their recovery remains in the lap of the gods. Then the window closes.

The PIS continued, “In depression, connections between regions involved in cognitive, emotional and memory processing appear to be weaker, and the brain’s ability to form new connections in these regions also seems to be reduced.”

Imperial is now widely known for psychedelic imaging in the field of mental health. Since the first wave of research there in the Fifties and Sixties, advanced neuroimaging technologies have been developed which can map the effects of psychedelics on specific areas of the brain.

One of them is the default mode network, a collection of structures in the mid-brain associated with mind-wandering, remembering the past and planning for the future—all those self-referring thoughts that demand their thinking. Another is the salience network: interconnected regions of the brain that select which stimuli are deserving of our attention. Some kind of dysregulation in these networks is thought to be associated with the experiences of “meaninglessness,” the negative appraisals of self and mental rigidity that are symptomatic of clinical depression.

To date, much of the neuroimaging research has depended on observing general changes in levels of activation across these networks following psychedelic treatment. Plasticity, which happens at the level of individual neurons, has been inferred rather than observed directly. The Imperial study I was being screened for aimed to take this a stage further. Combining fMRI imaging, which offers the precise location of activated areas, with PET scans, which allow any changes to be tracked across time, the intention was to observe synaptogenesis as it was happening. As per the PIS, “there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that ketamine’s antidepressant action may stem from temporary enhancement of neuroplasticity in important areas.”

A quick search of the literature suggested that most of the “growing” evidence was indeed inferred rather than directly observed, based on changes to larger patterns of brain activation or to neurochemistry. The only other evidence comes from animals: a couple of studies reported growth of dendritic spines in rats. But there are limits to translating rodent psychiatry: however grim it might be to spend your entire, brief life confined to an environmentally impoverished cage, the rat cannot be meaningfully diagnosed with depression or other human mental health conditions.

The lack of direct evidence reflected something of how provisional and callow much of the neuropsychiatric research on psychedelic therapy was. Even so, the current study was groundbreaking, using state-of-the-art technology in a clinically relevant area of investigation, and at the “hard science” end, compared to the vast majority of therapeutic research. It would also be eye-wateringly expensive: running scanners over multiple sessions with all the adjacent tests and staffing requirements meant the cost, even with a cohort of fewer than ten volunteers, would run into the high six figures.

The finance and science of psychedelic medicine are complexly entwined. In 2013 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated a variant of ketamine a “breakthrough therapy” on account of its apparent ability to reverse the acute symptoms of “treatment-resistant” depression. This led to a pharmaceutical arms race, the details of which were explained to me by Josh Hardman, founder of Psychedelic Alpha, one of the most reliable sources of financial information and commentary on the nascent psychedelic “sector.”

“Ketamine has been used ‘off-label’ for a number of years in the treatment of depression,” he told me, “but according to the calculus and playbook of pharma there’s little ‘defensibility’ in these cases: it’s not patented in any meaningful way for these uses, so there was no prospect of digging a meaningful IP moat around it.”

This changed in 2013 when the pharmaceutical company Janssen decided to use what Hardman called a “textbook procedure from the pharma playbook” to bring a variant of ketamine to market with patent protection. It chose one variant, s-ketamine (or “esketamine”), and partnered it with a specific drug-delivery mechanism, in this case a nasal spray. They then sought and achieved patent protection from the relevant government body on the intranasal administration of esketamine in treatment-resistant depression, under the trade name Spravato.

In other words, certain design choices that had little to do with empirical evidence allowed them regulatory exclusivity on their variant and permitted them to market it as a “new chemical entity.” This type of “innovation,” commonplace in the broader pharmaceutical industry, is, Hardman suggests, now entering the psychedelic sector.

But Janssen ran into significant problems with the health economics of its “invention,” as the price was forced up to $6,785 for a month of treatments twice a week. “Remember,” explained Hardman, “ketamine, unlike other psychedelic interventions, is associated with ‘temporary’ changes in neuroplasticity; meaning that its prescription has a different economic model than ‘one-off’ treatments.” Then, he went on, there was the fact that there was little long-term evidence for its efficacy. “Some experts, like former FDA reviewer Erick Turner, were flagging that even the more short-term data showed only modest efficacy and raised some concerns over patient safety.”

These factors have meant that even if Janssen is able to convince healthcare systems that it has a product with a novel mechanism of action, the cost and lack of evidence make it very difficult to produce a convincing economic case for a health authority, especially in the U.K., where NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) has a cost-effectiveness requirement for recommending treatments for the NHS. Meanwhile, Hardman told me, Canada had flat-out refused to grant Spravato data protection, the Canadian court finding that it did not warrant the designation of “novel compound.”

Such limitations do not obtain in the U.S. The FDA’s initial approval of esketamine involved loosening its definition of “treatment-resistant depression.” Previously this diagnosis had been restricted to those who had tried two classes of antidepressant medication (there are several, including SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics). It changed this to mean any two different pills: i.e., it could be the same class of antidepressant, as long as over the course of their depression history the patient had taken two different brands. Given the whims of prescribers and patients, this sets a very low diagnostic threshold.

Despite this, the initial FDA approval remains, and much of the subsequent clinical research has adopted the same criteria for treatment-resistant depression. Even with such low-hanging fruit, Hardman told me, Spravato has not quite been the blockbuster Janssen had hoped for, though it remains lucrative by most standards, just not by pharma standards: by 2029, Global Data predicts, it will generate world sales of approximately $383 million.

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Excerpted from Ten Trips: The New Reality of Psychedelics by Andy Mitchell. Used with permission of the publisher, Harper Wave. Copyright 2023 by Andy Mitchell.

When I was writing my book Raising Hell, Living Well I would repeatedly state to anyone who would listen that this was not a how-to or self-help book. Nothing against self-help books. I’ve been a reader of them my entire life, having found everything from answers to inspiration to backbone within their pages. They line my shelves like memories of old selves and old lives that were shed because of them. Their bindings are something I look back upon with pleasure, pride and sometimes—pain. The writers who share their talents, wisdom, philosophies, and intellect to make the world a better place to inhabit are my icons, idols, and a handful of times, saviors.

I found my way into writing through how-to books, whether it be the tattered and worn Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter (which I haven’t let go of since I bought it at the age of 18), Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, or the essential Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I found my way towards an ownable and personal stance on religion and spirituality thanks to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I found my way through my career with the help of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I found an escape from unhealthy or unhappy relationships thanks to The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman or the Art of Letting Go by Damon Zahariades. And I found myself in the books that brought me back to center like Jonathan Fields’ How to Live a Good Life, Brené Browns’ Daring Greatly, Paulo Coelho’s the Alchemist, or Quiet by Susan Cain. Whether it was love, guts, money, purpose, career, or kids I knew there was always someone smarter that I could turn to in the self-help or how-to section of my bookstore.

But if the whole thesis of my book is that by opening readers eyes to the culture of influence, they can hope to escape it, having it be a practical how-to felt contrary to its core. My subtitle literally says: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me). If I wanted my readers to think, discover, and explore on their own so they could fully embrace their autonomy and freedom, I didn’t want to tell them how to do anything, especially how to live.

Instead, I set out to make a book that was a how-come, opening their eyes to the programming of cultural, economic, geographical, historical, biological, educational, psychological, political and sociological influence to which we are all subject. Because in a world that had become much more unwell, unhappy, and unhinged despite all the how-to books, I saw a glaring hole in the market for understanding why we are the way we are. Maybe I could show that it wasn’t us that was the problem but rather something below the surface, below the mountains of influence throughout all of time and space culminating in this very moment. A root cause. My hypothesis was that all the productivity hacking, wellness seeking, and minimalism detoxes in the world cannot fix what’s ailing us if in fact, it is not us who are actually sick.

At different points in my life, I’ve sought out further understanding on topics that range from politics to persuasion to motherhood and culture. I have gone deep down the research rabbit hole to understand things like “what the Internet is doing to our brains?” or “why women make less money than men?” or “what’s the makeup of resilient people?” or “why do some people have all the luck?”. I like to ask big picture questions but also, I like to question why those answers are what they are. Along the way to writing Raising Hell, Living Well there were key books that answered some of these questions, creating the foundation of how I now think and view the world. While some might be shelved as how-to’s, they ultimately helped me understand how-come.

*

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

I can’t begin this list without starting with the very first book that opened my eyes in understanding that there is so much more hidden below the surface than we ever were taught in school or around our kitchen table. Or as the authors of Freakonomics say, that there is a “Hidden Side of Everything”. My first introduction to behavioral economics thanks to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner lit a new curiosity for the world in me, through the lens of their quirky analyses of why things are the way they are. This book implanted a “question everything” mentality in me in my formative years.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

If it’s not the luck of height, right birth month, family, or zipcode that propels some forward and not others, it’s the ability to understand human nature and instincts. As Robert Greene, the author of The Laws of Human Nature says, knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess. Understanding how-come someone might seek money, status, power, or fame allows you insights on their motivations and you can adapt yourself accordingly. This book beautifully draws on ancient stories and philosophies that are brought to life through the modern lens. My perceptions of others as well as myself changed drastically after reading this book.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

And if you’re not able to understand why someone is the way they are, the book Predictably Irrational shows us what happens below the surface. Author Dan Ariely picks apart how-come we are not to trust our assumptions, because even experts can be irrational. He reveals our cognitive biases and the tricks at play but delivers his experiments and research in a light-hearted manner, making our past mistakes more palatable. Most importantly, he shows us how-come we repeat mistakes time and time again, arguing that the irrationality is so patterned that it’s predictable. By knowing these patterns, it’s possible to stop falling into the traps our brain makes.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Speaking of mistakes I’d be remiss to not mention a book by Glennon Doyle that I still can’t shake out of my brain. Her book Untamed shines a spotlight on the repeated mistakes that are so commonplace we accept them as fact. I was already a feminist, but this book showed me how-come I was the way I was despite all my best attempts to not be boxed in. I was a product of the culture that surrounded me, and the cages it produced for me as a woman. I spent much of my twenties and thirties operating as a man would in a system built by men that prioritized men. I was so under the influence of this culture that I didn’t even know I was reinforcing the cage I was attempting to escape.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

No book helped me appreciate that we are a product of the influences of our generation’s zeitgeist more than Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. How-come I was so obsessed with digital culture and nostalgia in my later life was because my formative years happened at the nexus of pre-internet/post-internet. The nineties were when I consumed my core intakes of the world around me and boy did it influence who I would become! Looking back on that time period and my place within it, allowed me to see myself with new eyes.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

My fascination with the current era only grew as I consumed books about the digital revolution, the digital divide, the algorithms, technology innovation and regulation, social media and loneliness, connection and neurology. But it wasn’t until I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror that someone was zooming out on the entirety of the modern world to pick at scabs below the surface of our self-delusions that affected everything from how we see ourselves to how we see others. Jia’s work wasn’t just a reportage on all that ails us, and it wasn’t the first how-come that tied together personal narratives with philosophy and criticism of the modern world. But it was the first one I had read from a woman who came from almost the same generation as me, and it gave me a different perspective from those written by older PhDs, from the male dominated world of theory, criticism, and technology.

Monsters by Claire Dederer

When I picked up Claire Dederer’s Monsters on a whim (I loved the cover) I had to buy it. But it was the first page that had me immediately tucking myself away like ten-year-old Bastian in the Never-Ending Story. Just me, my book, an apple and a blanket while I journeyed through a world I had never known before. The writer’s entire book was a question: can we separate the art from the human? In fact, the book continued to pose many questions. Is using the word “we” a cop out in criticism? Why are specific individuals considered geniuses? Who crowned them so? And why? Or how-come? As with Trick Mirror, reading a female perspective in a genre often dominated by men shifted everything. Dederer resisted tying up her book with authoritative statements, telling us if we should or should not ban Picasso for his actions or if we can still dance to R. Kelly. Her book didn’t tell us how-to think about it. She lead the reader through her exploration on how-come we think, believe, and act certain ways based on culture and allowed them to decide for themselves.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When I began putting this list together I started with my own mind, moved through others’ minds, and zoomed out into social structures, accepted norms, technological systems and culture. But no book zooms out like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. This is the final book in my list because his work is the ultimate how-come book. Tackling everything from our revolutions (industrial, cognitive, scientific, agricultural, etc.) through to huge events like the invention of language, his book threads needles to tie momentous moments in history to issues like happiness, poverty, and sexuality. It’s hard to understand how-come if we don’t fully see the whole.

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Jessica Elefante’s Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me) is available from Ballantine Books.

US President Joe Biden brands Republican backers of his predecessor as ‘semi-fascists’; his Brazilian counterpart lambasts as ‘vandals and fascists’ the pro-Bolsonaro mobs who invaded the Congress in Brasilia on 8 January 2022; the mayor of Tel Aviv warns that Israel is sliding into a ‘fascist theocracy’; Modi’s Hindu-supremacist citizenship legislation is deemed the offspring of a ‘fascist vision’; while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – grotesquely advertised as a ‘denazification’ programme – is seen to signal the regime’s accelerating fascisation.

Faced with the worldwide proliferation, consolidation and ascendancy of far-right political movements, regimes and mindsets, many leftists, liberals and even some conservatives have reached for the fascist label. The term is now bandied around with ease verging on abandon, particularly in the United States, but its resurfacing does speak to the urgent challenge of diagnosing the morbid symptoms that populate our present. My book, Late Fascism, is an attempt to contribute to a collective discussion about our reactionary political cycle. To write it, I turned to the archive composed by the theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to shed light on our moment. What I found challenges many of the ruts, reflexes and commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged notion can and does devolve into.

The principal temptation for any contemporary thought on fascism is historical analogy. Faced with a toxic brew of social crisis, political violence and authoritarian ideology, the common sense reflex is to identify similarities between our present and the European catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s, so as better to prevent its repetition (usually by reanimating liberalism as the sole antidote to illiberalism). Fascism is indeed a matter of returns and repetitions, but it is not best approached in terms of steps and checklists dictated by a selective reading of the Italian ventennio or the Third Reich.

Rather than treating fascism as a singular event or identifying it with a particular configuration of European parties, regimes and ideologies, for the purposes of thinking in and against our own day we need ‘to see fascism within the totality of its “process”’ This also entails approaching fascism in the longue durée, to perceive it as a dynamic that precedes its naming. It means understanding fascism as intimately linked to the prerequisites of capitalist domination – which, albeit mutable and sometimes contradictory, have a certain consistency at their core. W. E. B. Du Bois gave this core a name, still usable today: ‘the counter-revolution of property’. For all their deep differences and dissimilarities, the Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black Reconstruction, the rise of squadrismo against labour organising in Italy, or the murderous codification of neoliberalism in Chile’s constitution can all be understood under that heading.

I do not intend ‘late fascism’ to operate like an academic brand, in competition with other names for our dire present. It is there to name a problem. At its most basic, like ‘late capitalism’ or ‘late Marxism’, it gestures toward the fact that fascism, like other political phenomena, varies according to its socioeconomic context. More provocatively, perhaps, it underscores how ‘classical’ fascist fixes – so intimately bound to the capitalist crises of their time, but also to an era of mass manual labour, universal male conscription for total warfare and racial imperialist projects – are ‘out of time.’ Ironically, many intellectuals and agitators leaning toward fascism today are actually profoundly invested in fantasies of a white, industrial, patriarchal modernity that have the post-fascist, post-war period as their seedbed. To recognize fascism’s anachronism is cold comfort, especially when liberal and neoliberal fixes to planetary crises – especially to disastrous anthropogenic climate change – are themselves criminally late and inadequate, leaving much room for manoeuvre to the radical right, which is able to reinvent its fantasies of domination directed at ‘women, nature and colonies’ in profoundly destructive ways.

An unreflexive struggle against fascism runs the risk of becoming sclerotic, self-indulgent or complicit with the very processes that body forth reaction, the lesser evil lending a hand to the greater one. When it does not question its own theoretical frameworks, its own habits of naming or indeed the pleasures of innocence, heroism and righteousness that may arise from these, anti-fascism can be its own lure.

Fiercely, viciously identitarian, fascism evades exhaustive identification. It repeats, but with differences, scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials – not uncommonly from its antagonists on the left. It can flaunt its relativism while trading in absolutes. And for all its Cold War association with the hyper-statist logic of totalitarianism, it breeds its own forms of pluralism and its own visions of freedom. My wager has been that it is possible to think cogently about the elements of fascism as an anti-emancipatory politics of crisis without equating theory and definition, avoiding the checklist of tell-tale features or the streamlined schedule of the steps to fascist victory. A critical theory of fascism need not take the form of a diagnostic and statistical manual of political disorders. The radical theorists of racial and colonial fascism that have anchored my own reflections, as well as my criticisms of historical analogy, can attune us to four interlocking dimensions of the history and experience of fascism.

The first is that the practices and ideologies that crystallised, more or less laboriously, into Italian fascism, German Nazism and their European kin were presaged and prepared by the dispossession and exploitation of ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ wrought by settler-colonialism, chattel slavery and intra-European racial capitalism (or internal colonialism). I believe that our ‘late ’ fascism cannot be understood without the ‘fascisms before fascism’ that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system.

Second, fascism has been differentially applied, experienced and named across axes of race, gender and sexuality. As we learn from the writings of incarcerated revolutionaries of color in the United States, political orders widely deemed liberal-democratic can harbor institutions that operate as regimes of domination and terror for ample sectors of their population, in something like a racial dual state. This means that both in their political origins and their strategic imperatives, abolitionism and contemporary anti-fascism cannot be disjoined.

Third, fascism is grounded in a modality of preventive counter-violence, its desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilisational, demographic and existential. The epochal panic about the ‘rising tide of color’ and the ‘colored world revolution’ that seeded the rise of fascism after the First World War has morphed (barely) into narratives of replacement, substitution or cultural suicide shared by mass shooters and European prime ministers alike.

Fourth, fascism required the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic state power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom. Whether in the guise of decentralized and deputized power or psychological wages, the fascist – as the phantasmatic synthesis of the settler and the soldier (or the cop) – needs to imagine him or herself as an active shareholder in the monopoly of violence as well as an enterprising petty sovereign, with race and nation serving as the affective and ideological vectors of identification with power.

If we keep these dimensions in mind – the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism, the differential experience of domination, political violence pre-empting an imagined existential threat, the subject as deputy of sovereign violence – we can begin to comprehend how contemporary fascist potentials converge and crystallize into forms of ‘border fascism.’ Whether that border be a physical demarcation to be walled and patrolled, or a set of fractal fault lines running through the body politic and multiply marked and policed, there is no circumventing the fact that, as ‘the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilizational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time – and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity – onto the space of territory. It will also, like its twentieth-century forebears, seek to gain control over the borders of the body, to patrol the demarcations between genders and sexes.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore has encapsulated the idea of racial capitalism in the formula ‘capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.’ Fascism, we could add, strives violently to enshrine inequality under conditions of crisis by creating simulacra of equality for some – it is a politics and a culture of national-social entrenchment, nourished by racism, in a situation of real or anticipated social catastrophe. As a politics of crisis, it is a limit case of ‘capitalism saving capitalism from capitalism’ (sometimes even creating the mirage of a capitalism without capitalism). Countering the fascist potentials and processes that traverse the global present therefore cannot mean subordinating the practical critique of capitalism to watered-down (un)popular fronts with liberals or conservatives. A ‘progressive’ neoliberalism – the one that lies in the back of most mainstream denunciations of fascism – is defined by the production and reproduction of inequalities and exclusions inconsistently accompanied by formalistic and formulaic commitments to rights, diversity and difference. Those who make common cause with it will have to do so in the awareness that they are ‘manning the imperial gates,’ allying with the cause to ward off its effects. Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism. The latter, capaciously understood, is not just a matter of resisting the worst, but will always be inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo the lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with such grim regularity.

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Excerpted from Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis by Alberto Toscano. Copyright (c) 2023 Alberto Toscano. Used by arrangement with the Publisher, Verso Books. All rights reserved.

For this installment in a series of interviews with contemporary poets, contributing editor Peter Mishler corresponded with Christopher Kennedy. Christopher Kennedy is the author of six collections of poetry, including four from BOA Editions: The Strange God Who Makes Us, which will be published in May 2024; Clues from the Animal Kingdom (2018); Ennui Prophet (2011); and Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (2007), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA. He is also co-translator of Light & Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil (2013), published by BOA as part of the Lannan Translation Selections Series.

He has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Kennedy is professor of English in  the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. The Strange God Who Makes Us is available for preorder now.

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Peter Misher: I would like to start with the question I ask everyone in this series. What’s the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

Christopher Kennedy: There’s a lot that’s strange, starting with why anyone feels compelled to write a poem given its marginalized status in the culture-at-large, but I’m going to say the confounding fact that it’s impossible for a reader to tell the difference between a poem I worked on for half an hour and a poem I struggled with for years. Sometimes I think it’s a byproduct of writing prose poems and doing what I can to make the poems seem reader friendly, even if I’m doing something relatively complex. Maybe the effect ends up being that everything looks like it took me half an hour to write.

Also, I’m speculating here because for all I know some readers can discern between them. In fact, I’m sure this is pure projection on my part. I should start labeling poems with a timestamp to show how long it took to write them. On the other hand, that could be embarrassing. “Two years, it took years, for this?”

PM: A few of the poems in your forthcoming collection The Strange God Who Makes Us were originally published some years ago. Could you talk a little bit about your decision to collect them in this latest book? I’m thinking in particular about “Occlusion in Long Rain,” as well as the title poem. I wondered if these earlier poems appeared to “fit” as you collected work for a new book.

CK: Both of those poems were in a manuscript that evolved from my thesis in graduate school. They were originally in verse, and the manuscript was a semi-finalist or finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize four years in a row. But then I was no longer Younger and ineligible to submit to the contest. James Dickey, the judge those four years, sent me a very nice letter encouraging me to submit again and to keep writing for him, for Yale, for poetry. He also asked for a copy of the manuscript, since he had to return the one he had to Yale. I sent him a copy with a note thanking him for his encouragement and letting him know I was no longer eligible for the Yale Prize and did he know of a publisher that might be interested in the book.

He died shortly after that, and I decided to shelve that manuscript. I had been revising it for years and was tired of looking at the poems, and in retrospect I feel as though I had become stagnant writing toward what I’d already written and not going forward as a poet. So, I started writing prose poems exclusively that represented a very different aesthetic from the “Yale Manuscript” which was liberating and set me on a different path.

The poems in the new book from that earlier manuscript fit the new book for a few reasons. One, they were originally written in verse as were almost all the poems in the new book. In fact, all the poems in the section about my mother were written as double sonnets originally, the last line of the first sonnet being the first line of the second. Two, tonally they seemed right, and they didn’t lose anything when converted to prose (poems). If anything, they seemed well-suited to the change.

PM: In your years of writing prose poems, do you have any observations about this form that you’d be willing to share? I’m curious if there are aspects of writing prose poems that you’ve discarded along the way, and, equally, if there are facets of this form that you are continuing to understand, perhaps differently than before?

CK: If I remember correctly, I started writing prose poems when I realized I was obsessing over things like line breaks and stanza breaks at the expense of the content in my poems. I decided to focus on writing more freely in early drafts and then imposing formal restrictions on what I’d written. That led to me writing prose that I turned into verse, and eventually I started turning the verse back into prose. Everything I write has a verse version and a prose version at the very least, but more often there are several versions in both formats, until I find the right prose version.

PM: To what degree do you think of yourself as a prose poet almost exclusively? Your response makes me think that you’ve made a kind of procedural commitment to it, and I wonder what keeps you coming back to this approach.

CK: The past few years, I worked on a short novel. It didn’t start out as a novel, and it may not be one, but it’s a longer prose piece in short chapters. In some ways, it felt like a logical conclusion to go there. It’s finished to the extent that it feels done to me, though I’m sure I’ll make changes once I get some distance, but writing that long form prose piece made me appreciate how much, when I’m writing prose poems, I think about all the things I would think about if I were writing verse.

I know prose poems seem like a different beast, but I no longer see the difference. I’m working on a new manuscript, and the poems in it are as verse-like as anything I’ve ever written. There’s a great deal of rhyme, attention to meter, etc. Maybe subconsciously I moved from the novel to more verse-like prose poems as a reaction to having been so focused on elements of fiction. I drove myself crazy with plot issues and characterization problems, and maybe it was a relief to focus on the things I love in poetry, even if they might be a bit hidden at times in my work.

PM: Let’s go back in time a bit to another question I ask everyone in this series. Is there a feeling or fleeting memory from childhood that in some way presages that you would become an artist and write poetry, as an adult?

CK: My father died when I was seven, and one of my older relatives, a cousin on my father’s side, John “Bozo” Corbett, and his wife, Gladys, used to visit my mother and me often. John was an incredible storyteller, still the best I’ve ever heard. He would drop Gladys off and go to the causeway at Otisco Lake to fish and stop by the Amber Inn for a few beers afterward. When he got back to the house, Gladys would prod him, and if he was feeling it, he would tell stories of borderline and not so borderline criminal behavior I’d heard many times, and I was thoroughly enthralled every time.

Occasionally, John would stop by with things for me to read, magazines mainly, sometimes ones my mother wasn’t happy about, and after he left, I would have to sift through the trash to find them and squirrel them away somewhere safe. But one time he brought me a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Edward FitzGerald translation. I read those quatrains incessantly, even though I didn’t understand them, and I became fascinated by the effect the poem had on me. It was visceral, as if my body were absorbing the language, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about what the poems meant to me, not in any way that would have made sense at least.

Not long after I read the book, my sister came home from college for a short visit. I have a clear memory of being in our kitchen and me telling her I was going to be a poet. She did a good job containing her laughter, but I could tell she was skeptical. I insisted that it was true, and she asked me if I had written any poems. I hadn’t, but in what was to become my modus operandi later in life any time I was asked if I had work to submit, I said yes.

She asked me to recite one for her, so I called her bluff and started my “poem” by saying “In this day and age” and then looking out the kitchen window. Seeing a car drive up the street, I finished the line with “people drive cars up the street” and repeated the refrain, “In this day and age,” followed by whatever was in my line of sight. My sister was hysterical by the end of my impromptu performance, and her reaction, ironically (any reaction is a good reaction?), made me think there might be something to this poetry thing.

It was several years before I wrote a poem, but that moment seemed to foretell a fate that would have seemed as ridiculous to anyone who knew my background as it had to my sister.

PM: When you started to write poems, to what extent did that performative, knowing, funny, kind of impertinent and disaffected “recitation” for your sister get into those early poems?

CK: When I first started writing poems, I would never have thought to be funny, to use humor in any way. I was writing “serious poems” about “serious things.” The first prose poem I wrote was in graduate school, and I never showed it to anyone initially. It was comic and it was in prose. I assumed everyone would hate it. I eventually showed it to Ken Victor, another poet in my cohort, and he said he thought it was the best thing he’d seen of mine.

That confused me at first, but it made me reexamine the poem, and I started to see that it might be a new way to approach my work. It was a serious poem, but I’d found a way to express myself that allowed me to use one of my strengths. Humor is my family’s way of dealing with or deflecting grief and sadness, so it came naturally to me once I allowed myself to embrace it.

Still, it was several years before I committed to writing prose poems that were comic/absurdist, and my first book, Nietzsche’s Horse, was the result. I had discovered Russell Edson’s poems in an anthology and became fascinated by them. I’d also read Carolyn Forche’s “The Colonel” and Zbigniew Herbert’s prose poems and eventually Daniil Kharms’ work.

The new book is more of a throwback to the “serious” poems I was writing years ago (though not exclusively), another reason why the two poems you asked about earlier felt right for the manuscript.

PM: What do you think necessitated this shift to seriousness? Seriousness, to me, seems to accompany “about-ness,” though something more comic or absurd is, of course, not about nothing. I wonder if you’d be willing to consider that binary. Is there a difference that jumps out to you between the serious and the comic?

CK: I think “about-ness” is a good way to describe the difference. Even though the poems aren’t necessarily about particular events, though some are, there’s a more concrete aspect to them than say an absurdist or metaphor-driven poem that is more conceptual or philosophical. There’s also the obvious, which is that many of the poems are about memory, which lends itself to that “about-ness.” Also, I was writing very consciously about climate change at times, and the effect of what’s happening environmentally to our psyches, or at least my psyche.

On the other hand, my more comic poems are also serious, but humor is a kind of mask that allows me to approach subject matter I might avoid or write about in a way that could be overly sentimental or hackneyed. Ideally, the humor draws a reader in, and the emotional undertone sneaks up on them. I’m a sucker for those types of poems. Think Russell Edson and James Tate, for example.

But the new book has less of that approach, especially the poems about my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I felt obligated to be as straightforward as possible with those poems. Since the experience was already absurd, it didn’t need any embellishment, and I didn’t want to disguise the speaker’s state of mind with any aesthetic choices that would obscure meaning.

PM: Your response recalls a poem in your new collection where you’re thinking of Russell Edson in the supermarket. It’s an elegy that echoes Allen Ginsberg seeing Whitman in the supermarket, although Edson isn’t there in your poem. It made me think of this poem as a sort of nod to going it alone without the absurd. Do you think that your approach with your new book felt like “going it alone” in some new way?

CK: It’s a poem that pays homage, as does Ginsberg’s, and it references something that happened when Russell gave a reading at Syracuse. He was supposed to read the previous semester, but because of some comical travel issues, he and his wife, Frances, ended up in Pittsburgh, which could be a Russell Edson poem. When he finally did make it to Syracuse, I picked him up at the airport and took him to the hotel. At the hotel, the woman working at the desk asked him how many room keys he would like, and he said, “200.”

The rest is imagined, but your question has me thinking that for some reason when I started putting the manuscript together, I knew it would end the first section, and it does feel a bit like saying good-bye to Russell and his influence. I can’t say I had an awareness of moving in a different direction, but the more I wrote, the more I could see I was writing about events rather than ideas and concerned not so much about accuracy as in emotional truth, if that makes sense.

Maybe the best way to answer is to say I was ready to see if I could write poems that were closer to the bone and didn’t rely on humor and abstraction as much.

PM: Is there something that you are willing to lose or say goodbye to when you begin to put a poem into prose form? I’d love to know what you think is gained or what feels satisfying about the transformation that occurs? I was wondering if you would talk about this in relation to the heart of the book, the second section, your beautiful Memory Unit poems?

CK: Well, to follow up on a previous answer, I was willing to say good-bye to a certain amount of artifice in the poems about my mother. The experience of being in the nursing home with her, trying to figure out how best to communicate with her, always at some emotional and psychological expense, was so overwhelming, that when I tried to write about the experience, I wanted the straightest line between what happened and what I could write to represent it as possible.

I mentioned before that those poems had been double sonnets, but that was after they were written as prose poems. I wanted to see if imposing the form would improve them, and I ended up sending those poems to the NEA that year and received a fellowship, so they must have been okay. But when it came down to it, I felt the prose poem format was closer to the actual experience I had. I don’t usually write quite so autobiographically, but there was no sense in trying to fool myself or anyone else, so I went with the straight-line approach.

PM: Because you’ve written prose poems prolifically, I’m curious how you think of the sentence as a unit within a poem. Maybe a sentence as opposed to a line is how you might measure the music of a poem? What I love about this new book and your work in general is that there is a moment-to-moment presence that I can feel in each sentence, a precision or care, even if the poem is propelling me through it to “find out what happens.” Is there anything that resonates for you when I say this?

CK: Those are great observations that require some explanation. I definitely think in terms of sentence, but only after having fashioned lines that work as verse that can be converted to sentences. Punctuation, syntax, and margin setting play a role. I always use a hard right margin and revise within that rectangular shape. Sometimes the lines/sentences dictate that I need to change the margin, but just as often the margin forces me to cut or add to the line, mostly cut. It makes for a cleaner, tauter sentence. It also allows for enjambment. Essentially, all the poems are verse disguised as prose.

That may be what you’re sensing when you said, “I can feel in each sentence—a precision or care—even if the poem is propelling me through because it is narrative.” That’s a very perceptive reading of what I’m trying to do.

PM: When you revisit the Memory Unit poems now in book form, what effect do they have on you? Do you have a different sense of why you wrote them after getting some distance from them?

CK: Once I finished writing all of them, I never thought I would publish the Memory Unit poems. I’m sure it’s because they didn’t seem like something I would write, so they threw me. Having some distance from them helped me see how necessary they were to write. I’ve written many poems about my father. His absence being the catalyst. I’d only written one other poem about my mother before I wrote the Memory Unit poems. I felt compelled to honor her and to try to unpack the experience of interacting with her as her memory faded.

We had a complicated relationship for most of my life, and the last few years of her life things became very straightforward. I had to take on more of a parental role with her, and I was determined to be a better parent to her than I was a son. We loved each other, but I resented her dependence on me, and she resented my desire to have as normal a life as possible given the circumstances. That tension was a significant barrier.

Also, my mother worked, and I was on my own a lot at a young age. Being so estranged from each other was a distance that was hard to overcome. One gift of my mother’s last years is that I was able to tell her things I might never have told her, things a son should be able to say to his mother, as simple as “I love you.”

PM: What was the experience like for you of arranging this collection with the Memory Unit poems as the centerpiece. How do you see the relationship between the Memory Unit section and the two parts that flank it?

CK: I remember how unsure I was about grouping them together in a section of their own. That uncertainty seems strange to me now, since there’s a discernible narrative to the section that would have been lost or at least harder to follow had I separated them. There’s also a narrative thread of sorts in the entire book, since the first section contains poems based on events from when I was younger, the poems in the Memory Unit section are from a decade or so ago, and the poems in the third section are based on more recent events and often concerned with climate change with the last poem, “The Coda,” consolidating past and present.

Ultimately, the Memory Unit poems feel like the emotional center of the book, so it made sense to place them in the middle, and it made sense chronologically, as well, which made the decision an easy one.

PM: After you mentioned the story about John and Gladys earlier in our conversation, I realized that John is also featured in a Memory Unit poem, which articulates what you loved about him – his storytelling. I also notice your desire in these poems to record your experience with your mother more closely. And then there’s the appearance of figures from Greek myths and epics. It almost seems like you’re honoring that “storytelling” part of you.

Is there a tension for you personally about working back and forth between a part of you that is in a mode to “record” versus a part that is less straightforwardly “knowing?” While we’ve both heard of poets beginning with a block of text and shaping it into verse, your process does strike me as very unique. What comes to mind for you as you’re reading my thoughts here?

CK: Working-class Irish storytelling and Greek myths and legends are foundational for me. John Corbett was the best of the bunch, but I was around many great storytellers, and when I was nine, during a blackout in the Northeastern United States, my mother and I were without heat or electricity, and we drove to her co-worker’s house because they had a fireplace.

Upon arriving, I noticed a book on a table in the entranceway. It had a picture of a man holding a sword and a severed head. I must have been staring at it, because my mother’s friend asked me if I wanted to look at the book. I took it with me to the living room and lay down in front of the fireplace all night, reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. That picture of Perseus with Medusa’s serpent-coiffed head in his hand was my gateway to a world that I couldn’t get enough of.

Kennedy’s boyhood copy of Mythology

When we were leaving, the woman said the book belonged to her daughter, but I could have it, and she would buy her daughter another copy. I still have the book.

The first poem of The Strange God Who Makes Us refers to when I asked my mother to buy me the first edition of a cheap encyclopedia I saw in a grocery store. There was a picture of Achilles in his chariot, dragging Hector’s body around Troy, and I knew the story from Hamilton’s book. The two incidents began a lifelong love affair with those myths and legends.

Coincidentally, John and Gladys’s oldest son, Chuck, an amazing character in his own right, left home at fifteen, lied about his age, and joined the Navy. He didn’t run away. He announced at the dinner table one night that he was going to New York City to join the Navy to see the world, and John left the house and came back with a suitcase. Allegedly, he gave Chuck the suitcase and told him, “Go see everything I didn’t get to see.”

Chuck ended up in Europe, where he went AWOL and set out to Majorca to find his literary hero, Robert Graves. He found out where Graves lived with Laura Riding and knocked on the door. A man answered. Chuck said, “Are you Robert Graves?” The man said, “Yes.” Chuck said, “I love you.” Graves said, “Then you must come in.”

He lived with Graves and Riding for a while, and the story goes that Chuck transcribed the manuscript of The White Goddess for Graves while he stayed with them. It might be apocryphal, since the book wasn’t published until about ten years later, but I choose to believe it. It occurs to me that Graves has a translation of the Rubaiyat. Lots of odd coincidences the more I think about it.

To answer the other part of the question, it might be as simple as having more confidence that the stories are worth telling or inherently interesting and don’t require more than attention to detail. As far as my process goes, I’m of the belief that prose poems need to honor poetry as much as they do prose, so I suppose that belief informs the poems to the degree that it’s noticeable, maybe? I hope not in an intrusive way, but I want the poems to sing while they’re telling the story.

PM: I have to wonder if there are musicians or songwriters that have inspired you or given you permission in some way as a poet to explore certain ideas, tones, feelings, approaches, or ways of being?

CK: The first songwriter who made me want to write poems is Neil Young. His albums, After the Goldrush and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere were instrumental in getting me to jot things down when I was in high school. We didn’t have a stereo, but my friend David had one, and I spent pretty much every day after school my junior year at his house, listening to music, and he had those two albums. Young’s voice has such a melancholy quality to it, and I was a grief-stricken sixteen-year-old.

That was the beginning of a long love affair with bands and songwriters over the years. You could add Marvin Gaye, Ray Davies, Paul Westerberg, Curtis Mayfield, Brian Eno, Joni Mitchell, Mark Eitzel, Aimee Mann, Sly Stone, Pete Townshend, PJ Harvey, Robert Pollard, Alex G, etc.

PM: It’s interesting that you’ve named Neil Young here as an important early influence. Listening to After the Goldrush over the past couple of months that we’ve been corresponding, it’s easy to see the similarities between his approach to songwriting and your approach in this book. On the Young album, there are some very cryptic songs, and yet they strike this chord in me even though I’m not sure what they’re about, like “Tell Me Why.” Are there artists that have been influential for you because they provide both an expository directness and mystery at once?

CK: The two books that had the biggest influence on me when I decided to get serious about writing are Denis Johnson’s The Incognito Lounge and Michael Burkard’s Ruby for Grief. I was in my mid-twenties and enrolled in a poetry workshop I’d seen advertised in the local paper. The class was offered through Syracuse University’s adult extension site, University College. It turned out the teacher was Michael Burkard, whose work I’d seen in a poetry anthology and been very drawn to. Michael told me I should get a copy of Denis’s book, which I did, and Michael’s Ruby for Grief had just been published, so I picked that up as well.

At first, Denis’s work was more accessible, while Michael’s was harder to grasp. Over time, however, I began to realize both were writing autobiographical poems that were on face value documenting experiences in their lives. Their delivery was the difference. Denis’s poems were more available at the surface level, but I began to understand how the music of those poems made them transcendent, mysterious if you will, whereas I began to understand that Michael’s work was, underneath the mysterious presentation, very straightforward.

For example, Michael has a poem in one of his books where he refers to “blueberry money.” It’s a poem set during summer in Nova Scotia where a relative lived. At some point, either because Michael told me or because it finally clicked, I can’t remember which, I knew it referred to money earned from selling blueberries. Once I knew, it seemed obvious, but before it had seemed fairytale-like.

Michael has this innate ability to make the most ordinary thing feel otherworldly, whereas Denis could describe having a drink in a bar in such a way that it became a treatise on loneliness and alienation, the world both beautiful and terrifying. Those influences are always with me, even if how they manifest is different and, hopefully, original to my sensibility.

As far as other art forms, a de Chirico painting has the qualities I’m thinking of, or Klee’s, whose work I know because I looked him up after reading a poem of Michael’s years ago. I can recognize buildings or animals or other objects in those paintings, but they take on a dreamlike quality and a significance they would never have if rendered by a lesser artist.

Music-wise, what you’re referring to in “Tell My Why” is a good example of a song that is both straightforward, musically, and lyrically, that has cryptic elements, like the chorus, that take it to another level. Young’s guitar playing is similar. He’s strumming and playing individual notes simultaneously. It looks easy, but it’s quite difficult to replicate. At least it is for me.

I was carrying around a lot of unexpressed grief as a teenager, and songs, Young’s in particular, that seemed to express some type of loss or other deep emotion, were cathartic for me. I didn’t need to know what the lyrics meant. I knew how they felt when sung in Young’s unorthodox sounding voice. He seemed to be singing from a place that had less to do with popular music and more to do with keening. Early in his career, when he was first recording with Buffalo Springfield, the record execs wouldn’t let him sing his songs at first. They couldn’t hear what I was feeling, I guess.

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The Strange God Who Makes Us by Christopher Kennedy is available via BOA Editions.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

Andrew interviews Alexander Sammen, author of “Forbidden Fruit: The Anti-Avocado Militias of Michoacan” about the sordid history of the avocado, the thirstiest fruit on the planet.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

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Alexander Sammon is a writer based in New York. His latest piece in Harpers is “Forbidden Fruit.”

Rainie Tsai Learns to Suspend Her Disbelief, Which Is Impressive, Given the Immense Weight of It, and Anita Hsia Presents Her Skeletal Assumptions

Rainie passed the empty lots where stray dogs steeped in their shadows, asleep. She hid her wrists in her sleeves. Once, Anita told her that getting bitten by an animal meant you were chosen by its species and would transform into one of its own. Since then, Rainie decided to shy from teeth and shelter her current shape. She preferred her borders not be breached. As she passed the shade of the sycamore, she did not step into its shadow, though she knew its shadow contained restorative properties, which she discovered once when she and Anita fell asleep with their legs knitted through its raised roots. They woke up hours later with perfectly exfoliated skin and no eczema on their knuckles.

Still, Rainie avoided walking alone to any part of the tree, ethereal or physical. She walked up to the lot instead, pretending that she was not stargazing at the strays, indulging her fear of fangs. She told herself she was walking in a straight line to the grocery store to buy a pair of new flip-flops for her mother, who insisted on the sanctity of clean feet, which had been violated by Rainie’s hourly regurgitation of sand onto their carpet. Rainie’s mother disapproved of her eating sand, even after Rainie said (in truth, she was repeating Anita) that eating sand was actually good for certain birds, since it provided important friction in their digestive system. Maybe in the next life you’ll be birds, but not this one, her mother said. In this one, you have a bad chin and good manners. Buy flip-flops only.

Before Rainie was allowed to go to the store by herself, before she was accompanied by the weapon of red thread around her neck, she used to go with her mother and brothers on certain free evenings. One of her mother’s favorite stories, which were few—she tended to accumulate stories like seeds, but never planted any—took place when Rainie was little and used to sit in the shopping cart as her mother pushed her through the seafood section. The whole back of the store was bright with displays of fish, some filleted and some still zipped into their skins, others gargling in tanks. According to her mother,

Rainie had pointed at every fluorescent display and mumbled, Working. Not working. Working. Not working. It took seven trips before Rainie’s mother realized this was a precise system of classification: All the foil-bright fish swimming in tanks were Working, and all the fish flayed on banks of ice were Not Working.

Working, Not Working. Rainie didn’t have a word for living. Whenever she saw Anita greet the sycamore by rubbing her haunches on its trunk, Rainie wanted to turn away. Even now, walking past the tree for the third time this evening, she wondered if the sycamore was Working or Not Working. She decided she didn’t know the tree personally enough to label it anything. Another time, Anita asked her to classify their own bodies as Working or Not Working, and Rainie hadn’t answered.

I don’t know, Rainie would respond now, how I would sort us. She only knew that Anita was alive in a way that watered everything else around her, alive with such generosity that she gave it away without knowing, resuscitating the sycamore and the sidewalk and the walls of the duplex that cleaved them apart, and a part of Rainie wanted to not be touched by it. Wanted to function without feeling everything, feeding its history. Anita wanted to tackle those fish tanks to the ground, release the fish, and render the hallways into rivers, but Rainie was relieved to walk away from those shallow fish-eyes, their foggy jelly. Those fish-eyes gaped at her, pickled and unknowing, forever static in their tanks, safe where she stranded them. When Rainie left the seafood section first, threading herself through the dairy aisle, Anita stayed behind with the aquatic species, circling the same lobster tank, waiting for Rainie to return. Since they’d decided to be dogs, Rainie was at least comforted by the knowledge that Anita was waiting for her. Every morning by the door, just like a stray, her mother said. Waiting to be fed or pet.

Last week, Anita tugged her to the lot when the dogs were sleeping off the heat and curdling on the surface of the blacktop. Yards away, the sycamore cast its shadow over them like a tent. Grabbing Rainie’s wrist, Anita dragged her to the chain-link fence, pointing at their rusted mouths and claiming that she saw a boy pissing through the fence, his penis slotted through the hexagonal hole. He was following your rule, Anita said. He was doing it in the lot, just like the dogs! Anita sounded impressed, but Rainie said it sounded like a recipe for tetanus. Skin was thinnest on your private parts, she said; it was what her mother told her: Scrub the folds of yourself gently and silently, and don’t linger too long in your own shadow. Don’t press your own pleats. Touch was only a tool.

But Anita laughed and said it was true, she’d seen it, and even better than that, she’d spotted a red dog squatting on the other side of the fence, catching the arc of piss in its open mouth, bathing in it, rolling pearls of it down its spine. When Rainie said again that this was a lie—she’d never seen one of those dogs catch anything, and she’d thrown plenty of sticks and pebbles at them through that very fence— Anita shook her head and said, You lack self-belief. Rainie rolled this statement down her spine, but somehow it lodged itself, and even now, as Rainie walked past the fence yet again, she thought of what Anita said next: Let’s try it. Let’s try being the boy and the fence and the dog. Rainie asked which she was supposed to be, and Anita said, You choose. It felt like a test, so Rainie said she would be the boy, since he had amazed Anita first, delighting her with his ability to pierce the fence and stitch himself into it. She was relieved when Anita seemed pleased by this answer. Try it, Anita said, but when Rainie pressed the whole front of her body to the chain-link fence, which was neon-hot as a grill, she found that she had nothing to fit inside the holes of the fence except her fists, her wrists. Anita observed her posture, walking around her a few times, then tapped her own nose and said, You need a boner first. That’s what you need.

As Anita continued to pace behind Rainie, stepping on her shadow until it was ragged, Rainie finally asked what a boner was and how to become one. You don’t become a boner, you own one, Anita said, standing directly behind her. Or is it that you carry one? I forget. Rainie turned her face so that her other cheek hissed against the fence, bearing its share of the heat. She imagined herself patterned now, like those mottled dogs in the lot beyond her, who had no word for ownership, who craved it all the same. Until Anita released her, Rainie thought, she would not move. Okay, Anita said, since we don’t have a bone between our legs like raccoons do—she’d once found a severed raccoon tail beneath a parked car, and inside its sleeve of fur was a bone, broken in several places and knuckled like a finger—we will just have our shadows act it out.

Standing beside Rainie, her legs a stray’s length apart, Anita pressed her heels into the concrete and faced the fence. To her left, her shadow slanted across the sidewalk, slashing it in half. Copy me, Anita said, and extended her hand as if she was going to shake someone else’s. She lowered her hand so that it seemed like a stalk jutting from her crotch, her fingers nudging through the hole in the fence. When Rainie glanced down, she saw that Anita had limbed her shadow, amending the body written on concrete. See, Anita said. If you just looked at my shadow, you wouldn’t even know that’s my hand. I could call it anything. Rainie, despite her instinct to dispute everything, couldn’t help but agree. If you considered only the pavement, you might think Anita owned a beak instead of a crotch, that her three- dimensional body matched her shadow’s flat anatomy. Later, Anita would use this as so-called proof that she could invent anything. For now, Rainie opened her mouth in wonder. For now, Rainie was not sick of Anita staring down at her shadow when they walked on the street or the sidewalk, hooking her fingers behind Rainie’s ears to impersonate horns, or instructing her to lift her skirt so that their shadow could have wings, despite the risk of attracting perverts.

But when Anita’s fingers pushed deeper into the fence, the dogs woke. Their tails snapped up like antennae, tuned in to the sky’s bad mood. Rainie grabbed Anita’s wrist and pulled her back. Dragging her home by the elbow, Rainie ignored Anita’s protests about how she wasn’t ready to leave, how she hadn’t even finished peeing yet. You know you couldn’t actually have peed through that fence, Rainie said, unless your fingers are faucets and your palms are bladders. Anita studied her hands so closely that Rainie regretted saying this, and when they were home, Anita asked if her palms could be bladders, or storage containers for prayers. All skin is just a bottle, Anita said, so what can’t I contain?

Rainie reminisced on all this, as she was prone to do. Anita is action, Rainie is reflection, Rainie thought, though she knew Anita would snort at this and say, What’s the difference? Why sort us? But Rainie had been doing it since she was a toddler in the seafood section, and it was difficult for her to stop. Giving up on the grocery store, she circled the lot three times each and then went home, counting the sidewalk cracks and crossing them out with her feet. At home, Rainie told her mother it had looked like it was going to rain, so she decided to turn back. Her mother didn’t say anything about how it was clearly not going to rain, as it had not rained in years and the TV was contemplating the possibility of importing clouds. Rainie had no excuse for returning with empty hands, except that every time she neared the sycamore, no matter if she was walking sideways or forward, its shadow always seeped into her mind and redirected her intentions.

That night on the middle bunk of her bed, Rainie looked up at the slats of the top bunk where her brother slept, his toes tapping on the end of the bedframe like the percussion of rain. For as long as Rainie had lived here, she remembered only one rain. It had happened when she was very little. She felt no affinity for the wet, and though her mother said it was a relief to finally have rain after centuries of drought, Rainie threaded her head through the doorway and immediately retracted it: The rain was mouth-warm, and it felt like being relentlessly pelted by her brothers’ spit, except the sky had no forearm she could bite in retaliation. But what she remembered best was the aftermath of the rain.

The next day, she and Anita stomped through the gutters and plucked earthworms, writhing like intestines, off the silver pavement. The sidewalk was veined with golden water, everywhere a mottled mirror. There was one puddle near the lot that was deep as a sleeve, wide as their torsos, and when they kneeled and reached their arms into it, they couldn’t feel a bottom.

The puddle was so bright that Rainie believed she could pocket it like a penny. But Anita warned her not to remove it. I’ll investigate further, Anita said, slipping her leg into the puddle’s mouth, and it swallowed her to the socket. When Rainie asked her how it was possible, since there had never been a meteor crater here, no explanation for why the water gathered here so endlessly, Anita said it was clearly a portal. Something was waiting to emerge, to breach the skin of this sea. She made Rainie wait with her under the sycamore tree, and when it was afternoon, the puddle alert as an eye, Anita dragged her over to the water and pointed down.

When they looked in—even now, Rainie wondered if this was some prank of the rain—they saw the faces of dogs. Rainie turned her head to catch the dogs craning over them, but they were not there. They existed only inside the sidewalk, their faces surfacing in the puddle. Their fur was patchy from years of licking one another roughly, and their ears were perfect corners. Water dribbled from their chins, a miniature rain. The skin of the puddle shivered, though Rainie was not stepping in it at all, despite her desire to smear those faces away, to turn from whatever fate was revealed. Anita didn’t seem startled at all to see those dogs and instead wrapped her hand around Rainie’s elbow and tugged her gently, as if to give them some privacy. As they backed away, their heels numb against the sidewalk, the surface of the puddle vibrated like a drum skin, and a paw punctured the membrane, then several paws, then dozens of paws, dogs bursting out of the water, a whole pack of them, streaming out onto the sidewalk, shaking out their fur like capes, water spattering everywhere. They nosed at the chain-link fence or lunged down the street. The pavement beneath Rainie’s feet vibrated for miles, bruising her soles, and she resisted the urge to run toward the sycamore and climb its branches.

Anita stood her ground. There are more about to be born, she said. Kneeling, she pressed her palms to the ground and memorized the rhythm of the dogs as they ran along the underside of the pavement and gushed from the hole, hundreds more. Their paws clapped against Anita’s feet through the concrete, meeting in applause, while Rainie felt them muffled, a distant stampede. Rainwater surged up from the puddle, cresting over them as the dogs geysered out.

The next day, when the world was once again crowded with overlapping droughts, the dogs gathered in the lot, bathing in saliva instead of rain. That was the beginning of their kinship with the strays. Rainie asked what the dogs were doing inside concrete in the first place, and Anita said it wasn’t their choice to fossilize. They had to wait for the rain to make a door, for this world to grow pores.

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Excerpted from Organ Meats copyright © 2023 by K-Ming Chang. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.