In Irresponsibility (Chris’s second book, after Nouns Swarm a Verb), his voice is flat and uninflected; one might describe the way it picks itself apart as cagily neurotic. His meta-language opts for maximum transparency. Imagine language as a glass, and poetry, as mud splattered onto that glass in compelling or pleasing patterns. Chris wipes the glass clean to reveal all of its light-bending flaws and distorting curves. Through this glass, syntax tangles and untangles: “Tidal pools pock the beach/ Seagulls loiter as they evaporate/ That is vague and snowballs[.]” At first we see the scene: the pools on the beach, the loitering seagulls. We only notice the vagueness after Chris points it out to us. Are the seagulls themselves evaporating? What is “that?” Is “snowballs” a noun or verb? Chris lends new weight to the phrase, “You really had to be there,” as he undermines English usage until we no longer trust it to accurately describe experience.

Each poem in Irresponsibility is titled according to the date and location of its composition, but these are far from naturalistic idylls. The book’s opening lines––“Midmorning beachcombing/ This rock is four letterforms”––project its first thought into the interstice between the object known as “rock” and the word that signifies it, like the inevitable moment in a David Lynch film when the camera zooms into an object and emerges in an alternate reality. Chris worries this gap relentlessly, so that by the book’s end, signifier and signified seem to us to be connected only by gossamer strands of convention. Time and place are jumping-off points for Chris’s peculiar brand of intellection, which describes an eternal reconnaissance inward, or, in his words, “Not a vicious circle but a vicious spiral.” These poems chase their own splintering ramifications through the echo chamber of one quietly attentive mind, “toward the end of one’s ability to diagnose[.]” Each line takes us further from the physical scene at hand, deeper into the catacombs of language carved into the landscapes, up to the point where all fundamental terms have been so thoroughly destabilized that there’s simply nothing left to say. At moments like these, the book asks the reader to insert the actual objects it can’t quite pin down with words: “Glue a small piece of sandpaper in the white space below.”