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Chapters (102)
  1. Cover
  2. PRAISE FOR
  3. Dedication
  4. ONE
  5. TWO GROUPS
  6. FACTS
  7. WORK
  8. A SYLLABUS
  9. ANOTHER SYLLABUS
  10. SUBSTITUTIONS
  11. MORE SUBSTITUTIONS
  12. TRIANGULATION
  13. TAXONOMIES
  14. THE SEASONS CHANGE
  15. TWO
  16. THE NEWS REPORTS
  17. RESEARCH
  18. THE NEWS REPORTS
  19. TWO LETTERS
  20. A DIAGRAM
  21. A COPIED PARAGRAPH
  22. THE REARRANGING UNIVERSE
  23. WHO WE ARE
  24. THE UNNAMED ELEMENTS
  25. POSES
  26. THE NEWS REPORTS
  27. CASTING
  28. AN INSTABILITY
  29. A FANTASY
  30. PEAK / END
  31. WOUNDS
  32. THE NEWS REPORTS
  33. FLUCTUATIONS
  34. HEAT
  35. QUESTIONS FOR A CLERK
  36. THE NEWS REPORTS
  37. THE ACTUAL NEWS
  38. GASLIGHTS
  39. THREE
  40. THE NEWS REPORTS (STRANDED PEOPLE SPREADSHEET)
  41. NAMES
  42. POSTCARD FROM S #1
  43. THE NEWS REPORTS (LIVEBLOG)
  44. POSTCARD FROM S #2
  45. THE NEWS REPORTS (FEED)
  46. POSTCARD FROM S #3
  47. RESPONSE
  48. WHAT WE WEREN’T DOING
  49. THE NEWS REPORTS
  50. THE MIDDLE PERIOD
  51. FOUR
  52. &
  53. &
  54. &
  55. &
  56. &
  57. THE NEWS REPORTS
  58. &
  59. A LONG NIGHT
  60. FIRST FIGURE
  61. SECOND FIGURE
  62. THIRD FIGURE
  63. FOURTH FIGURE
  64. FIFTH FIGURE
  65. SIXTH FIGURE
  66. SEVENTH FIGURE
  67. EIGHTH FIGURE
  68. NINTH FIGURE
  69. TENTH FIGURE
  70. ELEVENTH, TWELFTH, AND THIRTEENTH FIGURES
  71. FOURTEENTH FIGURE
  72. FIFTEENTH FIGURE
  73. SIXTEENTH FIGURE
  74. SEVENTEENTH FIGURE
  75. THE FIELD
  76. FIVE
  77. AN ORIENTATION
  78. ANOTHER ORIENTATION
  79. A DRIVE
  80. ASPECTS OF QUESTIONING
  81. SIGNS
  82. THE ENTIRE WORLD REVOLVES IN YOUR MIND
  83. SELF-REPAIR CAGE
  84. COFFEE
  85. FIGURE EIGHTEEN
  86. WAITING
  87. QUESTIONS TO LEARN MORE ABOUT UNDERLYING ISSUES
  88. FIGURE NINETEEN
  89. THE NEIGHBORING TOWN
  90. TWO GROUPS INTRODUCING THEMSELVES
  91. E BRIEFLY COMMANDEERS THE NARRATIVE
  92. THE INTRODUCTIONS CONTINUED
  93. WHAT IS AND ISN’T PREDICTABLE
  94. PABLO SENDS A POSTCARD
  95. MARINA TAKES A BREAK
  96. THE NEWS REPORTS
  97. LOSSES
  98. AUTOECIOUS END-STOPPED TANKA
  99. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  100. FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  101. THE PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE OF COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
  102. About the Author

not as grammatical but

calligraphic: the book not

meaningful tome

but meaningful to me

which it was

THE MIDDLE PERIOD

I’ll leave you here, hand myself over. I know it’s sudden, but there are parts of this story that can’t be told from the inside. I don’t trust myself. (Why should you?)

Who hasn’t struggled and failed to tell what matters—political desire, sexual desire, desire for help, desire to help. Intraspecies love, interspecies love. Lost and found and lost, or being-unto-loss: the dagger, suspended above.

The sentiment (a protest) goes something like this: Everyone has lost someone, but I have lost someone. Someone loses someone each second, but I have lost someone, even this second, and this. The perspective is unconscionably skewed. But still. The dependence of presence on the specter of absence is absurd. When you haven’t lost anyone proximally, tragically, the blur edges toward blame, or toward shame.

What can these theories do, in the end? Stories do more, dreams do more.

Theories give shape, in the middle period, to discussions of stories and dreams. Theories help enable interpretations—of stories and of dreams. Interpretations have been useful in the middle period: the period of almost-despair that passes for despair.

By leaving you here, I give myself to story, to dream. By leaving you here, I retain some hope of gathering under their sign. It’s late, too; the light is waning and I’m tired.

Signing off, with all my love—

E

FOUR

&

To say that they sat finally together around the rectangular wooden table, battle-worn and unshowered, each clutching a mug of hot cider or a paper cone of boiled and cooled tap water, and that the ones who had come from the city downriver were feeling particularly unmoored while the ones who lived in the village upriver felt the vulnerability of hosts, and that the turn of events that had brought the two groups together, or had at least brought representatives of the two groups together—the turn in which Ezekiel’s effects on the village, and to the neighboring towns, had stabilized over the course of a month and then, while everyone was looking the other way, Farrah had arrived to the congested and overbuilt south, stronger than expected and more terribly aimed—to say that all of this was above all unprecedented, though also ironic, would be to name a situation based on its contours alone, leaving out the mess of particulars without which the contours would have nothing to contain.