Goes on now except)

Ryan Skrabalak

Goes on now except), Ryan Skrabalak’s second book, is a schematic of grief for and in the machinery of thinking. The ways that memory and grief saturate, colorize, fabricate, elide–their malleability, their structuring force. And the ways memory goes on, carried across these poems by Skrabalak’s driftless, stochastic treble clef of flow states and Interstates, of mountains, motels, and Dollar Generals, and by his sharp bass line of dissent against the nation-state’s “ruined moon,” its “megacorpse.”

Locked on to the “microexpanding noise” within the lyric (or vice versa), and to the ambient and intimate frequencies of its own “textured light,” Goes on now except) asks: is a book a score, a house, a microfiche? And: “was that daylight a map for being real?”

"Music, like fog or logic, determines its forms, its arrangements, and makes its renderings known. How to describe this milky latticed state of feeling as a kind of walk through air? In the musical offering that is Goes on now except), Ryan Skrabalak loosens a landscape (walk now) of our senses (bend water now) and a vibrato in the visual sphere. A beautiful algorithmic motherfucker. A book of echoed lace, employment, and oral sex." —Tan Lin