2.10.23 / Ryan Skrabalak, Autoerotic Swirlys (Spiral Editions, 2023)

I’m bringing this Mossy Blog back from the dead for two reasons. First, my life as a parent has finally reached a level of stasis that I feel like I can once again occasionally participate in non-academic poetry-related dialog. Second, I have an increasing desire to write about other people’s poems in a loose, not-terribly-formal manner—a register I once reserved for social media, but increasingly Poetry Twitter feels to me like a group chat between like 15-20 people I care about, interspersed with ads and hot takes that feel purposefully bad and engineered to produce engagement. So, at least for me: not the ideal locus for semi-public-facing poetry thinking.

I also feel a need to write this afternoon because I just read and loved Ryan Skrabalak’s Autoerotic Swirlys, a chapbook out from the new Lawrence, Kansas­–based small press Spiral Editions. I ordered a bunch of Spiral books a few months back—along with this fuckin’ rad bumper sticker they made that says I’D RATHER BE WITHHOLDING MY LABOR, which I plan to place upon my 2010 Toyota Tacoma—and the books have been sitting on the table in my living room, accumulating detritus from the bucket of multi-colored dry rice that my toddler plays with—a “sensory activity,” we call it, which is also an apt descriptor for this lush and linguistically sensuous chapbook. It has a three-hole saddle-stitch binding and a yellow cover with the title letterpressed in red ink; the letterpress impression is light, one that you don’t really notice unless you drag your finger across the cover—an appropriate frame for this text, which is driven by a tension between a linguistically tactile surface and a sometimes-hidden poetic speaker who accumulates objects, memories, found text from Bernadette Mayer and Karl Marx, bits of punctuation.

The first thing that struck me about this text is its extremely good title, with its invocations of sex and childishness—an inchoate eroticism that, yes, swirls through the text, colliding sensual puerility with the sacred: “Fisher-Price made aspergill, secret boulder, loving plural.” The chapbook alternates between dense, breathless prose blocks—mostly comprised of sentence fragments offset by commas—and palpably chunky lineated poems. As I read through the prose poems, I had the sensation of variegated lingual systems being built. They fluctuate between the private and opaque (memory, not-quite-speakable feelings: “I love to be inside the weather like a color”) the public and visual (“fluids beside dumpsters”), and moments where these categories threaten to collapse (“I feel revolutionary when I am naked in the sunlight with another naked someone, but I know it isn’t.”) But if these prose poems articulate a swirling or spiraling—Spiral Editions is an apt name for this press!—the lineated poems feel like an unwinding, a drawing-out and warping of the line of flight into its base sonic elements. Like a Slinky you stretch into disrepair. Or the Grateful Dead.

Tonally, these poems feel somewhere between the thoughtful solemnity of a book like Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and the simultaneously heady and silly sensibilities of some of Bernadette Mayer’s shorter poems. This is a bit of a long chapbook—31 pages—and I feel like it makes a very definite poetic statement. For such a good book, it has a frighteningly small print run—only 35 copies!!!—so snag one while you still can. I’m excited to read the other Spiral Editions books, which look amazing.

More soon, I hope. Self-promotion time:  I have a book coming out from Action Books this March, and it’s up for preorder now.