Winner of the Twelfth Annual Believer Book Award

A gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse from poet Matthew Rohrer. In a Russian-doll of fictional episodes, we follow a midlevel publishing assistant over the course of a day as he encounters ghost stories, science fiction adventures, Victorian hashish eating, and robot bigfoots. Rohrer mesmerizes with wildly imaginative tales and resonant verse in this compelling love letter to storytelling.

this night they all seemed asleep for a while the stark shadows held me only my mind moved

wildly behind my eyes until I heard a tiny song coming from the driver song of a bandit’s broken heart, song of his betrayal I slept and dreamed I was awake