Postmodern poets, steeped in poststructural theory, have long been obsessed with the gap between words and things. But Chris stands out from the crowd because of how meticulously and reverently he pursues this line of thought. This is not coy language play, with its deliberately evasive meanings and whiff of aloof superiority. This is the emulsion of a mind at war with itself, not veiling but tearing down veils, behind which: always more veils. And Chris is less interested in the chasm between a rock and “rock”––between things and nouns––than he is in the nested implications of conventional syntax and mimesis. In particular, the way he treats demonstrative pronouns would be classified by any sane administration as torture. A million tiny cuts flay them open and reveal them to be hollow, recursive, and much less stable than their ossification in everyday usage would imply: “Also this is four letterforms and this/ is a pronoun which represents/ this.” By the book’s conclusion, the word “this” seems the dead letter office of language, a place where messages disappear.

Irresponsibility is, in part, an attempt to use a language that is insufficiently sophisticated to describe the world to do just that: “The door is either open or closed and/ there are many degrees of being open.” In this, it is a heroic act, an urgent attempt to expand the continuum of degrees language collapses into vertices. But it is much more than that; seldom has a book so obsessed with the vicissitudes of language carried such emotional weight. It’s not just that Chris seems desperate to escape from the hermetic gyre of his mind, a bifurcated mind in search of a true center, although these moments––“Brent, I have to break out of this and/ not just to try something new”––are profound. (“Brent” refers to Chris’s friend, the Californian poet Brent Cunningham.) Chris watches and catalogs the increments of his life as carefully as the increments of his language, and his theoretical diary of slippage skews personal. “Doorways frame/ where inside touches outside/ Not itself a space or place but a planar edge,” and “Iris hesitates in doorways/ and has to be touched on the back of her head.” (Iris is Chris’s daughter, who, at another point in the book, “played with toy guns for the first time today.”)