In an extended essay on Dear Navigator, Janice Lee offers an intriguing reading of I’ll Drown My Book as a “ghost story”: “The ghosts scurry across the tracks of my mind, leaving footprints on the margins of well-traveled memories, but never creeping out into the open. There is a neurological transcendence at work when we interact with poetry, when we interact with concepts and ideas on this level—the ideas that voice themselves when the letters shed off their physical traits.”  Lee goes on:

Each piece in the anthology is accompanied by a brief author’s defining conceptual writing in relation to her own writing process. In reading these, I think about whether ghosts have reflections in the mirror. When I stand in front of the mirror and recite “Bloody Mary” the appropriate number of times, what I see is my own reflection again staring back at me. So then, when “I am haunted by myself who is haunted by myself who is haunted,” how can I step behind the mirror? In each moment that I exist as an “I,” the state is continually haunted by the possibility of possibility.

Read the rest of the essay on Dear Navigator.