Surface Dwellers
A poetry chapbook.
Surface Dwellers | 37 pages | Paperback | Saddle stitch | November 2025
Hi everyone. Trying out something new here. As some of you might already be aware, there are, in addition to the novel and hybrid collection of mine that have been published by two different small presses, a number of book-projects which I’ve elected to self-publish over the years, at first as free PDFs on my website, and later as low-cost print-on-demand titles (also available via my website). The reasons for this are fairly simple: getting a manuscript published conventionally is generally a slow process with long wait times, and I would rather keep moving forward with my work than getting hung up trying to feed everything I produce through that system. Furthermore, a lot of my writing is weird and abstruse and broadly unmarketable, and sometimes I just don’t feel like trying to make a case for it to an editor; I would rather just put it out myself and let people make of it what they will.
The point is, I’ve written a new chapbook, called Surface Dwellers, and I’m trying out a new distribution model for it: you can either buy a real, physical copy of it that you can hold in your hand and put on your shelf here, for about ten bucks, or you can become (assuming you aren’t already) a paying subscriber of Garden Scenery, for about five bucks, and access a PDF of it, right here and now, below the paywall on this post. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time, meaning the offer here is basically a PDF for five dollars or a paperback for ten. Also, I have plans to release a lot more stuff this way, so while five dollars might seem a bit steep for one small PDF, consider that in time it could grant you access to many small PDFs, and maybe even some larger ones, as well as every paywalled post in my archive, of which there’s now dozens, maybe more than a hundred (I don’t really keep track). Anyway, that’s the pitch. I’m not much of a salesman, but I think it really is a pretty good offer.
As I alluded to above, part of why I self-publish work is to not have to describe or explain it, but I suppose I should put down a few words about Surface Dwellers, given I’m asking you to give me money for it. The work (which I conceptualize as a poem, but that doesn’t mean you have to) takes the form of a series of semantic “grids”, measuring three units across by four down. Each unit consists of a word, phrase, sentence, black dot, or (increasingly towards the end of the text) a blank space. This structure produces dense, overlapping textual relationships across multiple axes (row, column, page, etc.), relationships which both produce and dissolve meaning as-such. Certain words and ideas reappear, many do not. There is a political dimension to it, but there are other dimensions, as well. I am sketching this in very abstract terms not only because of my aversion to explication (if I could express what I wanted to express with Surface Dwellers in a more straightforward way, I would have done so), but also because I composed it, for the most part, almost a year ago, and in the interim many of its references have become cryptic even to me; I know that they are not arbitrary, that there is a purpose to them, but I no longer remember what exact purpose that is. The grids have their secrets.
In any case, here are a few sample pages for your perusal. Beneath them can be found the paywall, and behind it the link to read the full chapbook. If you’d like to read it, and you haven’t subscribed yet, just type your email into the box below. Thank you very much for your time and attention, and for supporting my work.
