The Tower

· 2 min read

The retreat ended up producing an entirely new section for the book. Half of it was stuff from other sections but the rest is entirely new.

I also finally, really finished this one. The finished book has 72 poems. From the original chapbook I started with as the seed, zero of the original poems remain.

I was always very careful to keep a tally of register and lengths to balance out every section and the book overall. Here’s where I landed:

Elegiac / grief

  • "Estonia,"
  • "800 Grit"
  • "In Memory"
  • "2nd Place"
  • "Read Receipt"
  • "Precipice"
  • "325 Degrees"
  • "Fallstreak Hole"
  • "If It's Cancer"
  • "Context Switching"
  • "Sorry I Died"
  • "Assistant"
  • "4 Days, 23 Hours, 28 Minutes"
  • "Elegy at the 7-Eleven"
  • "Volunteer"
  • "Declination"
  • "Annual Allocation of Weather Phenomena"
  • "The Want Jars."

Tender / intimate

  • “Sleeping On Your Side"
  • "Crema"
  • "Relief Valve"
  • "Non-Orientable Love Poem"
  • "Synecdoche"
  • "Andy's on East Sunshine Street"
  • "The Tower"
  • "Sundial"
  • "Poem for My Little Brother"
  • "Closing Statement"
  • "par cœur"
  • "Pressure Equalization"
  • "Together"

Speculative satire

  • "Deep Packet Inspection"
  • "Top of Mind"
  • "The Valet"
  • "Third Normal Form"
  • "Message of the Day"
  • "End of Quarter"
  • "Quiz on Tuesday"
  • "Sliding Window"
  • "Rate-Limited Heart"
  • "2600 Hz"
  • "Black Box."

Comic-absurdist

  • “Doot"
  • "Steve"
  • "k."
  • "The Author of The Tower Needs to Take a Drink, Now"
  • "Budget Cuts,"
  • "Hopelessness Bear"
  • "The Man at the Gas Station"
  • "Thomas"
  • "The Lotka-Volterra Model"
  • "1:87."

Dark parable / fable

  • “Rat King"
  • "She Loves Me Indeterminately"
  • "Downline"
  • "Debtors"
  • "The Operator"
  • "Vacancy"
  • "Providence"
  • "Gratitude and Redirection"

Social / political dread and trauma realism

  • “Safety"
  • "Contraband"
  • "Distressed Jeans"
  • "Pollywog"
  • "Cherry, Cherry, Cherry"
  • "Simmering"
  • "Majdanek"
  • "Peace of Mind"

Confessional memory / domestic realism

  • “That Freakin' Electric Shock Thing"
  • "Parhelion"
  • "Dissolution"
  • "Add to Contacts"

Other interesting things

  • Median poem length is 88 words
  • Longest: "Relief Valve" (~326 words)
  • Shortest: "Dissolution" and "End of Quarter" (12 each)
  • Number of concrete poems: 1
  • Number of poems that are also a complete runnable python application: 1