Ulrich Jesse K Baer/ Jessica Baer, Midwestern
Infinity Doctrine, Apocalypse Party, 2021
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is about the diabolical pact with analogies within language as an endlessly proliferating series of artificially derived re-semblances, halving & splitting and re-joining themselves. The affective currency of disastered bodies where the brain’s automatic hyper-completions run crunching errant timelines together into singularities that transgress homogenized social time in the neurodivergent cptsd text embodied. It’s about the (im)possibility of intimacy after violence and its fulfillment within my relationship to my 2005 maroon Ford Taurus. In a Super Walmart parking lot where I met myself in an identical car; the sinuous-duplicitous doubling that powers drives through the immaterial of language textures. A paean to Ivan Ooze, it’s about my decision to reunify my abusers out of the world of my life and into the cosmic everything-nothing faraway. It’s about the specters that stay behind anyway. It’s about the paranoia-machine of alienated desire; the perpetual inauguration of the uncanny-familiar in time as indexicality. It’s about the line in The Who’s “teenage waste/land” where he sings “I don’t need / to be forgiven.”
"Jessica Baer’s philosophical and entropic Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is more of a backward sermon than a doctrine, a sermon that sits on the edge of science and time, giving quenched counsels on existence, on survival, on livelihood, on the search within the JessicaBaerself: where the birth of the protagonist meets the birth of the author. Here language battlecrawls as a paranormal dual citizen of reality and lexical electrostatics. Everything in Baer’s penultimate world is comodulated for depth of chaos and for depth of furtive estrangements between logic and beauty. A place where language could experience post-traumatic disorder in science with some order and some chaos. Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilate from insularity and significant enigma. The speaker is a surgeon of the nascent. A machine or an aperture that ejects snowclouds of lucid ambivalence. Of course, in the rhetorical exploration of the self, there is the reader, the cyborg, the villain, Ivan Ooze, then Paul Newman, and then Clarice Inspector who show up for Baer’s inexact mathematical party dressed like bullets out of an experimental pistol, all hoping to miss us softly, a few inches, from our true literary artery. Be colossal and enter with cosmic form." — Vi Khi Nao
The haunted speaker of Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, self-reflexively invoked on the page as “Jessica Baer,” offers a philosophical-poetical treatise on the liminality of life, death, and memory—where the in-betweenness of living becomes rupture from which other, alternate timelines emerge. Like science fiction/fantasy author Gene Wolfe’s seminal Peace (1975), a highly poetic and unsettling novel which recalls scenes from the life of the possibly deceased Alden Dennis Weer, Midwestern Infinity Doctrine enigmatically traces how “[s]pace is haunted” in the post-pastoral Midwest. Here, lost dreams of a peaceful landscape belie a reality wherein “[t]he difference between living and dying is fuzzy logic” (Baer). Consciousness spreads across pages, spilling forth maladies, quandaries, and contradictions—such that life is—and it is within the life of the imagination that the reader finds themselves on a journey into and beyond the self in ways that breach the unknown.
Baer’s world is the world of the “wobbling putrescent,” where the flesh has gone immaterial and is revived again, shocked out of the grave in an endless circuitry. It is the body trying to make sense of the world through a kind of private language that often eludes sense: “I go backwards in time and find myself in bed with you, suddenly, we’re floating inside the open air, begin to drop Contemporary Me throws their arms around the pastmyself as we’re falling and I murmur, in a steady voice, into my own hair, ‘it made sense. It made sense it made sense.’” The “you,” that threshold between selves, is an alluring space that can also be painful. At times the speaker is pained by the intimacies of being surrounded by other bodies in the wherewithal, this whelm world. As Baer writes, “you try to tell me what you’ve done, gone & died again, in your head . . . I hesitate to speak, a threshold where your heart should be / learning to cross itself.” The heart crosses itself with the knowledge that we are here, right now, and now is kind of like forever when one lives in a moment for so long they never leave—(“He leaves the room and I do not move. I have always been here). We remain in multiple places and memories at once.
Baer’s world also conscripts the reader into its building, performing the page as a portal and simultaneous a zone of revelation where sharp and brilliant insights come to surface—“Time is in a sense only affective investment which serves as the delineating force (cosmic law) between the bios and the dead/undead of object-matter, where we live at this ledge of spilling cascade-time.” Timelines are broken apart and reconstituted through intuitive logic, and intuition leads the reader toward an infinity as much illusory as real—if we could only reach beyond ourselves so far to see it, we might have some knowledge to share. Baer’s speaker is filled with wisdom emptying from pockets of time, the hard-won wisdom of a speaker contemplating living and dying alongside joyrides through intersecting texts and philosophies, what it means to live out our words and the worlds they spin. This threaded text bears significance in relation to stars and sky and cosmos which continually loop back to remind us of the point of puncture/rupture. What pains one is the prick of time. But it is also revelation. It helps us “carve back to the core, if you can find it,” as when the speaker says, “Jessica Baer, the pain is as bad as it is recalibrating.” Baer is not only interested in scar tissue but goes deep into bone to realize the why and what for.
There are other why’s and what for’s that concern me in this text, for instance when Baer writes, “[w]hen you crossover thresholds to pass between universes, rounding the arch of the portal to the midwestern heart, a bell rings—its an apex.” I find myself taken back to a fantastical, almost supernatural Midwest, where I come to know the landscape as a universe once spoken and so twice lived by myself and the speaker—it is a Midwest embedded at the heart of a vortex, and I ask why I am here and if “I” even exist. The Midwest becomes a pause, a “caesura of sense” where we ask ourselves “did what you find what you were a searching for and/or are you actually not there, at all?” Baer writes, “[y]r mouth collapse into a tractor beam as tachyons filterback from the future past through the voices, singing in the dusky bar, smoke crags, and the melody repeats because the needle is broken can’t find its groove.” These fleeting impressions provide solace amidst, amongst, and against the troubling vortex of experience.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine will make one want to transgress the boundaries of themselves, staying up late on a journey past the edge of day and into something more beyond than beyond. - Julia Madsen
https://annuletpoeticsjournal.com/Julia-Madsen-Time-Transgression-and-the-Vortex-of-Experience
Jesse Baer’s Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a novel undoing the genre by unstitching time in both its form and content. Structurally, the book begins with “Final New Jersey Transcript” and “The Cosmic Dirge: Finale,” which sound more like titles for endings, and ends with “*Addendum: Subducted Time” and “Epilogue: Reversing Time,” seemingly flipping conventional order around. The reader enters the text as a detective embarks on a case, starting from sparse and ex post facto evidence and culminating in a fuller, though still incomplete, backstory. Suggesting a narrative reluctance to accept an(y) ending as conclusive due to time’s actual slippery dimensions, the chapter titles buck linearity. Within these nonlinear units, dominant concepts emerge around time, violence, and definition of the self. Baer’s approach to form ruffles those concepts, pets their fur backward, and recreates the experience of losing time, which can be one manifestation of trauma.
The Midwest gets a bad reputation sometimes, and I am from a part of it in between recognizable places. I can attest to the landscape’s potential for an outside-of-timeness, to how driving its highways feels a bit apocalyptic, particularly in the winter, particularly when it seems you’re the only one who sees anything out of the ordinary. Walk into a rest area and observe the families eating fast food or whatever and squabbling as if the landscape outside isn’t devoid of even rudimentary signs of life, lacking a color palette beyond shades of gray. The twilight zone. It is alien and alienating, a plausible setting for a novel imbued with UFO sightings and abduction reports.
On the road, Baer invokes the seasonally omnipresent deer in the woods and alongside highways, which brings with it a sense of unease. Baer writes, “A deer skins itself, because you were the math, inside velocity.” Hitting a deer, or any animal, with a car is unpleasant and dangerous. Deer are large and innocent. We empathize with them when we see them killed, perhaps because as roadkill they can look a little bit human. If a deer skins itself, that suggests you’re not at fault. Outside of hunting you really can’t control deer, which is itself a humbling reminder of individual frailty.
In the chapter “The Cesarean Scar,” time seems to run backward through two threads alternating in short sections. First, in a dreamlike scene a cesarean scar is untaped and the wound opened up. The last line: “Then, I break into my car.” And in between, a variety of quick scenes of confrontation take place, some with the narrator speaking from inside their car, contributing to the sense of reversed time. Amid the same chapter, the deer reappears in a new form. Baer writes: “My mother is weeping on the floor, a deer collapsed into its soft hind legs, an accordion cataracting within its mythological song, it won’t play, now.” Like the first scene of the chapter, this follows dream-like logic in which disparate common elements mash together. But it’s also true that trauma can cause fracturing of narrative, as we see frequently in film storytelling. When the accordion of your mother’s body no longer plays, breaking into your own car might be the most reasonable decision you can make.
The narrator tries on many different roles, often signaled by formal changes from one chapter to another, as they attempt to break time with language to access hidden truths from their own experience. Formal variations include radio transmission, abduction report, transcript. Most chapters bear titles or subtitles with familiar language that belies complex unexplained phenomena; just now, entering “time halos” into an online search engine, I find some video game instructions that tell me to “jump through the wall.” Irrelevant but apt. Like light halos that people with low vision see when driving at night, time halos would be experienced as pinches or radials of time. Variations in speed of time are impossible to prove since felt time is relative anyway.
These attempts succeed in breaking time. Baer writes: “this gesture expulsed what we were, waves attenuated. Slower than that. Carve back to the core, if you can find it.” Here we are, subject to time fluctuations. “In the spaceship, we just kinda float around.” No one knows how long it’s been and we are powerless. Further, in the chapter “Interlude: Time Mirages,” the narrator shapeshifts and “become[s] a paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” In this role they perform competence amidst chaos and disrupt otherwise-inevitable harmful events. Human parameters might be self-destructive instincts, like the horror film lead who runs to the basement to hide. Suggesting that time manipulation is not uncommon, Baer writes: “Beneath the surface of the midwestern plains, thousands of women are burrowing wormholes in time. Their bodies crush through geological history.”
There’s a laundromat in my neighborhood with floodlights as bright as the World Trade Center memorial. I imagine mischief took place in this parking lot and the owners increased the wattage until it was no longer a fun place to be. How would you explain the vibe of a laundromat to an alien? “After solemnity enmeshed you within the liminal space of empty laundromats,” Baer writes: “you pursue yr precision in its opposite.” The laundromat is a difficult, even vulnerable, place, a place to get caught up in grim emotions. The scene quietly depicts a breakthrough: to “pursue yr precision” is a liberatory venture, and if one can turn toward it from a rock-bottom moment, then perhaps the laundromat is a site of great potential.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine requires deep engagement as an intellectual exercise; it is a challenging read and an interdimensional adventure. To read a book like this one, the reader must slow down, stop reading for information and read instead for mood, atmosphere. Baer has crafted an homage to science fiction literature and media through this novel’s amalgamation of forms. The X-Files mantra “the truth is out there” is not just a TV catchphrase, but a resonant touchstone for the narrator, for abductees, and for anyone estranged from their own past. The same can be said of this novel. - Krystal Languell
https://bigother.com/2022/03/14/review-of-jesse-baers-midwestern-infinity-doctrine/
Excerpts:
My abilities were bleeding
This gearshift linguistics as Blanche Dubois spins her web and Telemachus eyes the suitors all things come to suspension. I reside here with my ambivalence as the propulsive force of the sumptuary absence which animates my line, dangled to catch what? Until we catch the light, her haunted music, and I want magic—to be revisited by the language of the sphere’s harmonies. The felt revolution which unties the thread to perforate my speaking throughout-time.
I will myself forwards into the slipstream rendering a chasm between my feeling self and the desire to say it is texture. This antinomy does not resolve it does provide decoys in the form of internal tensions perceived as absolute ends I refuse my own promises. Once one was to love to love dearly and truly and absolutely, my own polestar and to guide be guided by light I lay down my instrument having woven the tune from which I can imagine no escape. This lingering marrow leaks out fulfilling my absence in the root of my being, to be weeded interminably struck out and erased radically from the ledger of all botany. I dismember myself because forgetting is a caesura. The mythics of an endless sentence and its intervals deployed ludically, without remorse. If it was an imposture to supersede myself in secession to the chase itself, then I am a counterfeit symbol, lay it to rest.
He hides in the orchard, removing his face from my vision like sloughing a mask. I find the porcelain artifice of his betrayal strung against the tree bark, where all masks cast down light and I castigated beneath its unseeing vision. It replicates interminably.
Eye holes.
Here is the architecture for the artifice you were sewing and molding, kneaded with hands, the pressure lingers in the material: a dull heat throbs. As necromantics refrain from the living we cascade like water simply dazzling and without recourse to scission I carry my wound at my side, its hemorrhage makes the stakes made of our passing through each other, relinquished its autumn which dawn wound began. Dehiscence splinters the parcels where you packaged your fruiting, effloresce, its nimble occupation to fulfill the destiny of all plant’s nature, raggedly divulging the seeds of its wreckage to the impartial observer who held heaven with his shoulder. Staggering dust stirred throughout the vista. Did I summon him here? To look down.
All masks are their own desideratum to look out, and this contracts with infinity whose hilt I applied to your sign and the contours forgiven with my fingers parsing silences that rounded the gate, to chase quixotically from the crushed music of pastures. Its wreckage surmounted me where I watched the passing of light upon the ruins of a world that forgot me before I began to molder.
I came here to rust, I tell you with my gesture. It’s slower than patina, slower than the creeps of our own gardened delirium. How do I honor the dead who speak through my hearing them.
It was never yours? This injunction to compose it is music.
& we were dawn’s last word.
The radiation turns inwards toward the core dragged bed sky tug your claws out from me. Ousted in time’s jostling tracks. Shunted with Triassic chronology between us, escapes. Granular knowing your exit exit reason. Strategic deployments of mythology to luster through time. Scoured in the interior surfaces without losing reception. The cloud buzzed with cloud thoughts, overdrawn at the memory banks.
I wake up in the stall between times, in another ether body. On the table looking up eyes could not escape from mine. My mother says no, fractals. You were untethered when you spread your legs beneath space. The thermal pressure encodes when the crust reveals your secret weather. Its secret brain
You drag your memory out of me like an enclosed space for time capsules buried in the ground. We built a genital monstrosity out of earth. Shaft of dark antimatter and the revolving's soundless.
It’s so hard to keep going once you’ve left the continental shelves behind you must speak from the top of your head, cortices scramble for it, and click your heels once not again. You’re trying to freeze time and this doesn’t make you prehistoric, molasses, the screamcrushed insect means what? Your segments—busted.
Cleave to god cleave to rage cleave to rhythms in yr body Kristeva says I wreck ostracized death by turning. Swerves inside the body, dendrites bang to. The living around persona, in absentia, in a cigarette. You mashed your hand trying to.
I know you love me you sonofabitch just look at all these circles on your arm terminate in mud you burned holes through to dig your way out back in dirt. I ask you another question.
How long have I been waiting. To hear it ricochets echoes disclose nothingofthemselves. I have to creak, floor boards be reburied in earth, the tremors were subsiding mountains between you.
You came once if you ever came, come again and we all fall away.
The ladder stretches into in visibility, octaves lapse in the root, of what you were when vanishing.
http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview
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Purple hinges the sky together. When electrical towers volt, we park our cars beside the end the end of time.
I.
In the midwest, bodies are guided by a preternatural internal magnet. At the center of the vanishing point of the horizon we converge: the Super Walmart. In the dream, you disclothed beneath the fluorescent lights, on the talkshow yr culpabilities were revealing.
“Do you have an individual reading light like, uh, a clip? For a book.”
I frame the employee’s face between thumb and index finger, at the crux of an alright angle. See, a square. Where’s its edges
Lately I’ve noticed myself making theatrical gestures that borrowed motifs from the movies. I like to wiggle my fingers into the itch after triggers, raising my hand towards You. You can lift mostlyanything.
Behind the supercenter, its immortal gloaming a refinery pumps slowmagma against the purple-contour ripped sky. Outloud, colors I cry My God, My God.
No one has the one product I need. So flatten space, you try again and mists strangle the possibility of depth the light contained. I hesitate before the solid blooming blocks of Indiana industrialnight. My Ford Taurus is parked across from another ford taurus they both smell like a fire hazard. When you have to magnify everything to get to the truth, shifting scales, I turn my head back, lower my body into its center, rocked away and carried forward, running at that improbable night
II. Indiana Abandoned
My weeds my weeds my weeds my weeds, my weeds rapture the air and hunk the concrete.
Pacing nurseshoewhite, and terminal. The abandoned hospital ahead of us finds the wedge in yr heart and finality dislodges it. What did you need this for
A red brick facade.
We enter through an improbable door. https://tskymag.com/2019/06/jessica-k-baer/
VKN: I have never interviewed someone semi-rum(my)? before so thank you for giving me an opportunity to be a little bit buzzed. Speaking of buzzness (is that even a word?), your prose reads to me like a motorcycle swerving in and out of European cities indeterminately. How do you describe how words exit your consciousness onto the page? Do they move like a motorbike? Or something else entirely?
JB: Haha. Thank you so much for that beautiful image. Sometimes when I feel dislocated in spacetime, I find myself running up alley stairways in the Balkans but I never realized I was on a motorcycle until now. When I write I think of fluid dynamics, so like the eddies and suspensions of silt in a river and the breathless vertigo of the grace of being able to speak with myself fluently. I also definitely try to remain in proximity to death, like a stunt worker driving a motor bike.
VKN: Should your readers wear protective helmets or latex gloves when they read your work? What clothes should they wear when they open your prose?
JB: A hazmat suit would be sufficient, but better yet, an antique cosmonaut suit with an old diving helmet. Sometimes the air gets sucked out of the room of my body, is given to the movement of the piece and I want my reader and me to have a cosmic tether while we submerse and cyclically resurface. I wonder if the cosmonaut tether is tied to anything at all.
VKN: Cyclically resurface? Cyclically resurface makes me think of bicycle wheels drowning in ice, thawing out by spring, and then resurfacing for the summer seasons. Partly deflated, but ready to spin again if someone has the courage to re-pump.
JB: I like the quirkiness of this indomitable bicycle. If consciousness spins like a wheel then sometimes when you're moving fast, skids must be inevitable. I wonder if the bicycle ever changes positions or if it’s spinning in place, posthumous and subject to the mediation of the seasons. By cyclical resurfacing I think I’m describing sublimation, like the spaces where everything coheres and cocontaminates together so that it can be transformed. I think this piece passes through turbulence but is wrought into something that exceeds it.
VKN: How long did it take you to write the experimental piece “Mother Issues”? And where did you write it? Was it in sea-induced Providence or pre-slushy Chicago?
JB: That piece was written in feverish bursts of painful energy across about eight months in Chicago. I was intermittently soft homeless, so falling through space, so perpetually redefining and then losing the possibility of domesticity. For much of the time I was living in a diy space in Chicago converted from a gutted grocery store into a sort of curioso type open floor plan filled with Hammond organs, skeletons, and music equipment. It was also written in the vacillating sometimes painful interference zones of interpersonal intimacy.
VKN: I am sorry to hear the pain you endured. Livelihood hardship is one of the most terrifying conditions to exist in psychologically and physically. It’s a kind of unspoken torture and it seems endless. It warps our relationship to humanity and makes survival a perversity and not an adversity worthy of conquering. I understand and know what you mean. How were you able to shift out of it? What changed? What is your recent residence like now? Are you happy with your roof?
JB: Thank you for your very kind response; this is why I have so much difficulty with Bachelard’s poetics of space—it posits, like, a universalized unconsciousness of space defined without dispossession. I’ve spent my entire life rapidly transitioning between locations and I think this informs my work. Dislocation is a major issue for so many people and it’s important not to stigmatize the person who experiences its effects. I have privilege still in the spaces I’ve been given that might be wrested from others. I’m certainly still tempering my resultantly engrained wanderlust but for the next few months, am settled in a brick house in north Chicago. I think that my sense of temporality in my writing is reciprocally shaped by the velocity of my personal movements.
VKN: Would you like to accelerate the force of your velocity? What kind of temporality would you most desire for your work? What is the perfect piece of writing that doesn’t hope to take the shape of a tornado? Your thesis adviser, Carole Maso, talks about vortices in her classes a lot. Do you share her vision of vortices? And, what is your relationship to them, if any?
JB: I’m actually trying to paradoxically dilate and crystallize time because I am afraid of it, so I want to collect it in the ground and slow it down like amber. I think of pain as magnetic remanence that might shape a durable pattern in the materials we have. Often I feel a piece is finished only once I’ve reached the resonant frequency of my own body. If I set a vortex into motion, I would sound its eye.
VKN: What are you working on now, Jessica? Can you describe your project to us a little? Are you working on a novel? A poetry collection?
JB: I’m working on a piece called “Midwestern Infinity Doctrine” which is a psychogeographical study of the relationship between the flatness of the Midwest and different articulations of infinity, shifting between macro and microcosmic infinities. It’s about time and UFOs and conspiracy theories, sanctioned and unsanctioned knowledge, rhetorical paradigms, interpersonal violence, and what constitutes a “plausible” self. It shifts between numbers station broadcasts, manifestos, and auto fiction. I want it to be like a haunted radio for the drowning.
VKN: Your MID sounds majestic and scientifically enigmatic. We are in different geographical radio stations, transmitting rhetorical materials that look like an interview. Speaking of the Midwest—I am in Brooklyn right now and you are in the Windy City. I hope by conversing with a soul sitting in a red-curtained bedroom in Brooklyn doesn’t deform or skew your infinity doctrine. What was your experience in Providence like? Did you love it? I love its easy access to the ocean.
JB: What’s it like in Brooklyn right now? How does the weather feel inside you? When we met, we all talked about visiting the coastline. I like to pause before impossibly large elements. I constantly drove to Beavertail beach to find an immensity capable of more-than holding my feelings. I thought pvd was like the movie The Fog and I was Adrienne Barbeau in the lighthouse watching out for the flash of an ice pick through the mist. So, complicated impressions, haha.
I love this interview because right now I get to interact with you like a phantom typewriter. Infinity is definitely lurking behind the red curtain; you can find it mostly anywhere, I like to think.
VKN: Brooklyn is chilly, and so un-rumlike. I took three train stops and the weather inside me is tropical. I am a pineapple that has been roasting too long on a space heater, so to speak, though there is no space heater in this room. There is St. Germain inside me too, not the sofa but the elderflowers. What is inside you? I hope a bookcase or two and a fancy, silver wastebasket. I love wastebaskets. I am addicted to them the way one gets addicted to lollipops.
JB: My wastebasket is certainly unlined and small objects pass easily through. Thank you so much for transmitting your rich vitamin c to Chicago! In Mississippi, as a child, I would receive lollipops through what I called a spacetube at the bank, that peristaltic plastic tube that sucks up ur personal checks and delivers candy. How do you feel about banks with tubes? Did you ever go to the dive bar on Jewel Street in Providence with the juke boxes?
VKN: I love taking large and small bills to outer space. I think money is a better time and space traveler than Doritos. I think I may have given the bank tellers some by accident. I think so, yes. I didn’t dive very much and I didn’t bring any gold bars to the bar. I am not very good at listening to American music, Jessica. You must miss Providence very much? Did you ever walk on Wickenden? I used to live on that street.
JB: I used to chainsmoke in an alley off Wickenden and read Bataille a lot. I am so self-similar despite (because of) my viscousness. Oh wait! Also I was obsessed with the neon sign for the aquarium supply store on Wickendon which perfectly evokes slushiness. I took pictures of it everyeveryday. Have you ever taken a photograph of the same object repetitively and systematically over the course of time?
You really have to keep multiple denominations with you when you’re performing space travel. I miss everywhere; I’m a nostalgia machine, woof. Let me know if you need me to go get those Doritos back for you.
VKN: How many umbrellas do you own?
JB: 0. I have to borrow them. My car possesses two but it’s practically its own autonomous entity now, maybe my most enduring relationship. How many do you own and what color?
VKN: I own 1 beautiful armpit-held canopy, gifted to me by fiction writer Ali Raz. It is yellow and egg-colored and slightly psychedelic. Like most umbrellas, it’s inefficient—like it was designed for humans to frighten the rain or entertain the clouds or something and not to clothe our clothes from the rain, but I love it because it was gifted with thoughtfulness. This leads me to ask: what is your favorite piece of writing you’ve written? What do you love about it? And, has your writing ever clothed you from snow? From slushiness? From infrared light? From solar radiation? From indeterminate discourse with Foucault?
JB: That sounds like a beautiful gift and I hope that you have spooked the rain consummately. I want the record to show that I lol’d at being clothed from indeterminate Foucault discourses—what force could possibly protect us from him. Can I ask if you have a favorite book you’ve written? My favorite thing I’ve ever written is a poem called “Foreclosure Rodeo” which features many repressions which are done and undone by volcanic lava horses. Do you think writing can be protective or that it’s a conceit like an umbrella, or that the answer is both/and? I work through antiphasis a lot now so it’s hard to see writing as a stabilizing structure because I think as soon as I build something I unbuild it again? However I want as much infrared light to come in as possible.
VKN: My favorite is the one on its way to being born. I don’t think writing can protect anyone from anything. I used to think it could—that its gravitational center leaps outward and places you inside of a period, for X amount of time, and when the paragraphs walk away to take a shower or use the bathroom to leak, it sneaks back out to end a run-on sentence or two. I think writing, in this sense, is really lame. But practical. How do I stop my students from being writers, Jessica? What did you love about “Foreclosure rodeo?”—love those two words as a couple that shouldn’t ever get divorced. Please don’t divorce them even if you find excellent lawyers for them. All of those “e’s” and “o’s” in such tight vowel-inducing space and the “r’s” to disrupt them. Where did you write it? And, when? Were you young?
JB: I just saw Kim Hyesoon read in Chicago, which was a devastating eviscerating ecstasy, and I asked her about the sort of impossible geometries I think she animates in her work, where infinity hides in the corners (Derrida is digging it out) and the contamination between inside and outside, and she mentioned the eye as I think an interface that problematizes the in/out determination in a beautiful way, as well as her hope that the field of vision women are trapped in by reciprocating eyes will open and expand through her poetry. Like Alice in Wonderland style but much better than Carroll, I hope that writing will cause us to fall through portals that never cease opening out, which is not safe but unsafe and trans-safe. I want all bb students to be writers because I am gauche and sentimental. I want the erotics of confused diary entries and excessive revelation. I wrote it when I was a dreamy 20-something swimming in a pool of soupy infatuation. I like the idea of writing inserting pauses where you can rest from the world—a caesura to end time.
VKN: Your description of Hyesoon makes me want to read her—“eviscerating ecstasy.” How gauche are you?
JB: I know you’re not finished writing this question but omg South Bend. Gauche enough that I spend a lot of time in Hammond IN. (You can even dock your boat at the Hammond Horseshoe Casino on the lake). - Vi Khi Nao
http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/jessica-baer-interview
Jessica Baer’s new book Midwestern Infinity Doctrine, out from Apocalypse Party, might fuck you up. A revelatory cosmic kick from punk Chicago, with breakneck quantum leaps and time collapses. Dense, grief-ridden, but also loving: maybe you didn’t think a book could hold this much, but turns out MID is a portal.
Writes Vi Khi Nao, “Here the linear lives within the subliminal sequencing of itself, breaking out a kind of disco of sorrow, hypervigilant texts that hope to dance into bijections by abandoning itself to lexical chance. Here the abyss of Baer’s prosaic, cryogenic world does not thaw, but hyperventilates from insularity and significant enigma.”
I chatted through the virtual ether with Baer about the midwest, aliens, dreams, and time.~ ~ ~
Noah Fields: How did Midwestern Infinity Doctrine begin as a project?
Jessica Baer: It began because I emailed a friend of mine and asked them if they had ever had the experience of being in multiple places in time simultaneously, and they asked me to elaborate on that sensation. And then they said that I should write a project about it.
NF: If you had to summarize it, how would you describe your “midwestern infinity doctrine” as a thesis?
JB: I have been continually trying to summarize Midwestern Infinity Doctrine. The work lives on in my own attempts to understand what that work is for me personally as it’s continuously redefined. But if I had to give a doctrine for what it’s about, there’s like two dimensions that are interlocked.
On one dimension is what we could conceive of as the political real. So in that dimension I am trying to talk about conspiracy theories, social paranoia, alienation from desire, toxic masculinity and how that relates to those things. So like, depictions of violence in masculinity and violence perpetuated through toxic masculinity — where does it come from? how does it relate to alienated desire? and how do we disrupt what is perceived as the linear flow of time? It’s partially to make a new space, like an anomalous or autonomous space for — thinking about [Michel] Foucault too, some sort of like heterotopic space — for time to exist in a different way, so that people who don’t relate to time in the way that it’s presented to us by capitalism have a space to perceive time how they experience it.
So that’s the top dimension. The bottom dimension, underlying that is a comment on literature and feeling trapped by literature, and wanting to create some kind of writing that does something else or that escapes the expectations of literature and trying to figure out if the literary project itself can be a transgressive act or is more like a trap.
NF: I’m curious about where the Midwest specifically enters into that. Or maybe more broadly, what the Midwest means for you?
JB: One of the important aspects of this work is thinking about infinity. I am not a mathematician or physicist, and so I probably have a poor mathematical conception of infinity, but I do know that there are multiple infinities. And there’s different proofs for that, but there are uncountable sets that show that there’s more than one infinity.
When I think about the Midwest, I think of this optical illusion of endlessness — because the Midwest is so flat, that you can see for miles in any direction. Like Lake Michigan: Lake Michigan seems like a massive ocean-like presence, because it’s so flattened and endless looking. That sort of horizon of perspective draws you to the idea of infinity as something that I think you experience in the Midwest because of the landscape.
But I also have a lot of nostalgia about Chicago because it’s a place that I love. Because I feel like it’s an incubation chamber for weirdness, in a very warm way. But also post-industrial America? That is the Midwest — like these decaying, rusting cities, super Walmarts, just stereotypical American culture that is sold to you in terms of ideologies and American narratives.
NF: Sure, a place becomes more than a place. It’s like a vacuum sucking in all these ideological underpinnings. Let’s talk about those dreams! How do dreams play out in MID?
JB: I mean, the Midwest is sort of a dreamy space. Chicago, for example, has a veneer of nostalgia and sentimentality. Have you felt that? Like the personality of Chicago, how it’s spread all over the architecture and the neighborhoods, and this idea of what it means for a place to be Midwestern in the United States. So it’s sort of like a dream space of this nation that we partake in producing and reproducing together, because of course Chicago doesn’t exist — it’s occupied land. The United States doesn’t exist. The Midwest kind of exists, it’s kind of in the Midwest of the country, but relative to what?
NF: In your book, you write about becoming a “paranormal investigator to save you from the human parameters.” Can you tell me about what it means to be a paranormal investigator?
JB: Paranormal investigator for me is a useful way of conceptualizing the fact of being a poet. So it’s this sense of investigating the zones that exceed the normal or the accepted as empirically or ontologically given. So, existing in and putting a stethoscope to these fringe realms outside of what is accepted social reality.
For me personally, I feel that writing poetry is like being a person on the beach with a metal detector. Paranormal investigation is a similar thing — like if you imagine someone investigating a haunted house and moving through the rooms, knocking on walls listening for ghosts. It’s not that different from the way Jack Spicer conceives of it, I think when he talks about his poetry as coming from martian voices on the radio. It doesn’t matter if he believes in the martians or not, it’s that he believes in the idea of receptivity to something that exceeds what he knows.
NF: Hm. I’m interested in what you said about the writer’s receptive role, and in particular, I’m curious about the way your writing is maybe receptive to time’s multiplicities? How do you receive time in your writing practice?
JB: I’m glad you asked that question because I would love to assert right now that Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a failed project because I failed to understand how to discursively reproduce nonlinear time. It’s built so thoroughly into the trappings of prose fiction especially to experience things in accordance to a linear conception of time that I still don’t even understand how to break that.
In terms of how I would ideally ideologically conceive of time? In this work I’m resistant to positivism. Any conception of linear time seems to depend upon a positivism like that things are building upon each other, and usually that is premised in a Christian conception of time or a capitalist conception of time, where everything is working towards some good end. In this book I wanted to disrupt that idea and argue that things aren’t moving towards some good end. And in many ways, things are just trapped in like an ongoingness where they’re not progressing at all.
NF: IDK, when I was reading your book, I didn’t get a sense of linear time. I guess I’m pushing back a little bit on this idea of your book being a failed project. I mean, I acknowledge failure can be a goal, like in Bhanu Kapil’s project [Ban en Banlieue]. I totally respect if failure is part of how you want to frame your project, but I also think that there is something that you are articulating that feels anti-positivist and offers a different way of orienting to time and poetry that feels vastly original and mind-boggling.
JB: That is the most flattering thing you could say that you felt that my book did reproduce a nonlinear time. Yeah, that is exactly what I wanted to do. Bhanu Kapil is so exemplary in terms of thinking about this beautiful carving of fragmentarity not really coalescing into some monumental project or a project of like a “major language” (in the Deleuzian sense) but like creating the minor works that are the actually significant works because they transgress those expectations.
NF: Who are your interlocutors that you bring your discursive universe?
JB: So maybe the most important interlocutor that I bring into it is Alvin Lucier because of his album I Am Sitting In A Room, which is an album where, because he has a stutter, he is trying to perfect the tone of his voice by recording himself saying this whole speech, and then playing it in the room and then recording it again, until his voice is lost in the resonant frequency of the room. For me, I think of that as a sort of creative praxis of the zone of art existing in this almost impossible space between the idiosyncratic stutter of the individual voice, and the universal — or supposedly universal — space of the overall artistic practice and its given expectations. And so it’s that interference zone when you’re moving between being Alvin Lucier’s unique stuttering voice to being just the resonant frequency of the room, and in my opinion that’s like a really good allegory for their process of making art.
And then there’s [Julia] Kristeva, the “Queen of Space” — so one thing that’s happening in the book is that it’s also a space opera. [Laughter] I’m like a cosmonaut, and I’m continually addressing this figure of Kristeva who’s like this matriarchal, but then this matrixial space, like a generative space — thinking about literature thinking about building universes. As a cosmonaut, I’m constantly refining her and trying to deliver some sort of message to her, which continuously fails.
NF: Among these semiotics and messages, perhaps: “alien hand prints.” You write,
“There’s a parenthesis for what’s inside me. if you fillspace, it’s an infinity
symbol.” I’m glowing with the alien hand prints fanning across my chest, patteddown from a fire. Who sets it, renews?
Can you tell me about these alien hand prints?
JB: Oh, yeah, alien hand prints. This is about interpersonal violence. And it is about the experience of having a UFO visitation. This is something that I’ve researched a lot and that I’m working on a project right now about and planning to do more with in the future.
To conduct the research for this book, I visited the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago: one of the most important UFO research organizations, which was run by this ultimately disgraced astrophysicist Dr. Hynek, who because of his relationship to UFOs became a persona non grata in his field. And so now, all of their records — which are first person accounts from people who have seen or have been visited by aliens etc. — are just housed in this person’s basement. And when I interviewed the person who’s responsible for the archive now, he said that the vast majority of the people that he was interviewing or who wanted to make a report wanted to remain anonymous, because they had so much shame about this experience of seeing something that exceeds the space of the socially given real.
That is one of the major themes of the book. Because we live in an incredibly gaslit society where the real is very much calibrated by authoritative forces. Like gender violence or even just the experience of alternative genders. These are things that we are gaslit about individually and locally, as well as more globally. So I was using this idea of “alien hand prints” — people who’ve been visited by aliens, people who experienced that or feel that they’ve experienced that — to think about the hand prints that are left on people who experienced violence. That violence leaves a hand print that may be visible to you or that may be pertinent to your life that may stay with you until you die, that other people may attempt to convince you does not exist, could not exist.
NF: For me the violence of gender as this orienting (or disorienting?) force or bottomless gravity field hooks up with your description of how “space is haunted.” And it makes me wonder, where in the hauntology of violent space-time can you sort of just be in a non-threatening way?
JB: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the primary tensions of the work, that inter-relationality is what prevents that being, and also accommodates or creates the possibility for that being. And so it’s so difficult to find those interrelational or interpersonal spaces where one can just be themselves, or become themselves, as a changing singular selfhood in relationship with the selves around you.
In this work I mostly focus on relationships that fail to accommodate that space or, like, are incredibly antagonistic to that space, but I have a few moments where I bring in those holding spaces, like people in your life who radiate that sense of safety that allows one to finally come to a sort of resting place, briefly.
NF: Absolutely. Do you think that Midwest Infinity Doctrine in some ways a love poem?
JB: Yeah, I mean this book is in many ways inspired by the aftermath of an abusive relationship in which I was in love with the antagonist! And that is a space that I also wanted to create in my literary work, because that space is so fucking stereotyped and codified in all of these very ridiculous and reductive ways that says you’re a bad subject if you fall in love with someone who hurts you; you become a good subject, if you leave them. And so this book is all about how you can leave and your life is still fucked up; you can stay and experience real meaningful happiness with them, even if it’s ephemeral. It’s just so much more complex than that. But what I think is a shared experience is the way that I felt frustrated by the fact that I wanted to love this person and their orientation was so anti-relational and destructive and violent and underscored by things like toxic masculinity and paranoia that I couldn’t, even though I desperately wanted to. And, as a result, they were able to inflict an incredible amount of damage onto me which I still live with.
But it’s definitely a love poem to the Midwest. It’s a love poem to friendships, relationships, queer friendships. It’s a love poem to science, which I think is also ambivalent.
But also, for me personally, this work was really terrifying, because in this book, I accidentally predicted my mother’s death a few months before it happened. Which, I don’t want to sound ridiculous but I think that when you write, you’re open to intuition and perception, like you’re especially open and receptive. And so it makes sense to me actually that in this book, I was able to pick that up. But I guess I’m grateful for that because it also means that in some ways this work allowed me to start processing my mother’s death before it occurred, you know? And if we’re thinking about mobius strip time, my mother is like alive and dead simultaneously; she’s gonna die again, she’s already died in the past, and she’s alive in the future and dead in the past; and the same thing will happen to all of us. And yeah, I like the idea of being able to experience that relationship in this less linear way. - Noa/h Fields
https://medium.com/anomalyblog/paranormal-investigations-with-jessica-baer-d5a454c61466
Jessica K. Baer, At One End, Essay Press, 2020
AT ONE END collects excerpts from a longer science fiction epic composed in a hybrid autofiction style, a mediation or recuperation of traumatic memory: the trans body, here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shape-hood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me.
At One End and Midwestern Infinity Doctrine are two stunning new works by Jessica Baer that explore mergings and transformations of yous and Is, pasts and futures, trauma and its aftermaths. In the interstices of sound, where words merge, the living world in Baer’s writing bursts outward — an island ascending as foiled tectonic shift. This linguistic merging is also a thaw evoking an apparition of identity, haunted luminescence of self-in-mutation.
The writer characterizes At One End as “excerpts from a long science fiction epic.” In this collection of five titled segments, an unnamed time traveler is the only narrative constant as they move through time, affective spaces, and alternative endings. Through the sporing of time, in the metamorphoses of living, the present has been rewound, “No singularity, but repetition.” Assemblages of sense are made and unmade; narrative arches drawn then demurred; and references to characters (a mother, a lover) renewed across geographic signposts — New Jersey, Providence, the Moon.
Baer’s genre-bending text is an extended exploration of metaphors, such as of overheated and melting bodies standing for psychic instability, that survey the experience of being alive at a point in time inhabiting a body-in-formation. It explores these metaphors to convey the dissociative experience of the trans-body or the liquifying logic of recombining embodiment. In the introduction, Baer writes “The trans-body here, my trans body represents an attempted topography, mouthing around shapehood, which fails to resolve into any ideal epistemological dimensions but, instead, like the syntax, mutates within your looking at me.”
Selfhood in Baer’s universe does not parallel self-awareness or the ability to name one’s affective states. It is rather a relational tension between the speaking subject (which is multiple, engrained in oceanic resilience) and what lurks adjacent to breath. The “I” is ever dissolving itself so as to reemerge. And the “you” is an “I” looking at itself, but never fully distinct from it. Baer’s writing rips through the “you,” a redacted self, a grounded observational fissure. It remakes the “you” in myriad guises: the fecund image of a lover, a mother. The desiring and regretful “I” moves in the shadow of interrupted speech and averted gaze, a disappearing and estranged observer of one’s observing, whose “gendersmelt” holds the slippery wave of its escaping.
Images of self keep transforming and replicating. In the folds of time, phases ellipse into phases, so “you phase transitioned, shifting between states of solidity and fluency, slagging your neon green across the red sheets.” The body melting into steel or elsewhere built “from spare parts” beams with affective vibrations and object-knowledge. It absorbs and emits a history of sensations. It has been inducted by the implications of unilateral desire. At times, the body becomes heat, a tungsten connectivity turned telepathic hotspot: “see my body is burning all the time but no one else can see it so they can’t avoid the flickering halo of flames and I never wanted to hurt anybody.” Temperature unleashes the body’s travels thru misunderstood connections between body and brain. The burning sways in general invisibility.
At the end of this text, an exchange occurs between two entities, a reconciliation between the “I” and “NJMother.” Yet, the undergirding conflict is not specified. The NJMother assuages the “I” of an unspecified guilt: “It’s not your fault.” In this reconciliation, things of the past are exchanged and shed — a transaction that decides a future: “I just wanted to pick my things and leave theirs in exchange.” Many questions remain. Do the things of “theirs” belong to the lover in the first section? Or is the “theirs” referring to an abandoned iteration of the self? Why does NJMother appear here forming a kind of triangulation? The indeterminacy here is perhaps the point. Which object or being is so singular as to detach itself from its own mirror image? What is so distant as to have no parallel or precedent? This hyperbolic quest to fully inhabit one’s singularity lies at the heart of At One End. The title itself indicates that the one is only one. Nothing exists besides what is manifest in this iteration. Yet, the world repeats. Repetition is everywhere and the alienation pleating Baer’s writing dwells within a paradoxical tension. The pain (and forgiveness) the you/I needs emits from the one end, one exit, one premise jutting awkwardly against the “yet again.” Baer says it all distinctively:
Back on the moon, I remember my anti-quark, and wonder where it’s waiting for me. Maybe it’s stuck in the charged vistoelasticity of the lunar dust. Perhaps I was brought here to disturb the dust so that it plumes in dense flurries of soft white. If I could loosen my disremembered anti-quark from the lunar surface soil, which disintegrates to itself, I could break this chirality. I would disengender the spin that drives me away from you.
“To break this chirality” is to create a new equation, to reestablish novel relations of mass and perhaps also to recalibrate the psyche toward a fresh order, but also to “disengender” the motions that frame dialogical understandings within consciousness. Let me state the obvious: there are many possible readings of the above passage. This hermeneutical richness and density epitomizes the experience of reading Baer’s work — the very reason it requires an almost Weilian attention to unfurl its vibrant signifying range.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is a cosmological interpretation of the posttraumatic condition.
Here, Baer continues to blend autofiction and science fiction to explore a repository of personal history. Vampirism and alien abduction exist alongside the distillation of quotidian life and memory. In this longer manuscript, time travel becomes a state of consciousness, which represents the experience of trauma and abuse; the narrative unravels in fractured chrono-nuggets, from the future into an uncovered past back to some uncategorizable time-spindle. The world moves backward into the sight of grief and loss, into the autobiographical pressure of meta-commentary:
The auditory hallucination I’ve been experiencing since I left an
abusive person in 2016 is my brain’s attempt at a
hypercompletion of ambient sounds it’s a PTSD-related
phenomenon in the complicatedly intertwining zone between the
body and the mind where my dysregulated autonomic nervous
system and my hypervigilance device eachother together to
gather me away from
what is ruptured-time
and you’re not here in the pause but the wreck in my body
keeps gathering
Time is a socio-political relationship that permits the funnel tension of desire — which in Baer’s text is the driving force of time travel. Desire propels the time traveler who seeks to escape traumatic pasts but yearns for different endings, for the elusive variation of life. The past endures in the entanglement through which mechanisms of surveillance turn biological life into a late capitalist laboratory of institutional experimentation. So, Baer writes, “To situate ourselves within the polis is to situate our dreamful proximity to the idealism of linear time and it is in this sense that time becomes the privileged site where bare life is transformed into politicized life, reflexive with the coefficients of slowness and speed accounted for in a normativizing gesture towards homogenized time.” If norms spur forces of compliance and categorization, Baer’s text instills a total disruption of expectation through virtuosic linguistic and narrative inventiveness. Notice, for example, how the analytic mode of the previous passage shifts elsewhere toward an incomparable lyric register, one that recreates the negative space between words to rephrase their conceptual meanings:
We were cryogenically frozen into the hillside, for a trilliontrillion years, devoured by plantmatter. Here, We lose four hands making the shape of what is only between them. The earth ruptures its belt and the mountain buckled, drawing everything into the void pause before matter evolves, a chemically evoked litany. Yr body is the wet shell of a naked fetus this life feeds there, vibratile plasma. And the stars run hyperchromatic scales furling the night further away, a helix magnetizes: two ends that never meet. Repulsed because they were the self-identical.
What destroys us is also what releases an expansive perception of the pulsating chains of connection between events, people, and the tiny links driving the unimaginable. Yet, an inability to break with the re-experiencing of traumatic memory undergirds the notion of infinity that grips the attention of the subject. In the fold of an eye, the refracted light revels in endlessness. Looking itself mimics the experience of infinitude, and the multiple ruptures in the act of seeing mold the possible iterations of becoming. In the chapter “Earth In Memoriam,” we learn that “Jessica Baer,” the persona through which we experience the text, has been admitted into a hospital ward. The details of Baer’s life unfold under a scene of institutional surveillance:
“Your patient file mentions that you’re from the south.”
“Why don’t you spend more time in the recreational hall? The nurses mentioned that they never see you socializing with the other patients.”
“We need you to provide an emergency contact. If we could just contact your family, we could make arrangements to keep you here. Without insurance, you’re likely to be transferred to the state hospital. I think you will find our facilities significantly more comfortable.”
Under such institutional scrutiny, Baer introduces the idea of infinity, here inspired by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, we encounter the idea of infinity through our finite thought and the overwhelming sense of an infinite content that can fill it. In looking at another, one finds the plural singularity that each gaze returns — the Other is a face looking at our unseen face. The “I” is a face shielded from itself, that approaches itself only through what it mirrors for the eyes of another: “He jots a few notes, in a jerky authoritative hand. One last look through glass lenses, the light slips across, blotting out his eyes: infinity. Levinas annotated this division holding me closed.” The posttraumatic condition holds the subject captive in a loop that the awareness of infinity alone may interrupt. Infinity recognizes the irreplaceable singularity of each finite being, a relation that precludes the possibility of repetition. - Isabel Sobral Campos
Jessica Baer, Holodeck One, Magic Helicopter,
2017
“Jessica Baer’s devastatingly imaginative poems feel closer than any other contemporary poetry written in English to neo-Baroque writing from more southern regions of the hemisphere. IMHO at least. The norms limiting the sayable are as pulverized in Baer’s hands as in the poetry of Perlongher, Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Haroldo de Campos.
Witness language acquiring a propulsive force shattering the time and space divide: “we wind up / in two timezones of experiential / holodeck, I’m ignition / here?” None of these cosmo-terrestrial phenomenologists are part of the North American canon and yet it’d seem Baer has absorbed them all.
Horses and holographs. Identity as orbit. A bricolage of psychocartography, a prism in love, poems for when the aliens finally come but only want to talk to the rocks. Holodeck One is Jessica Baer's debut chapbook, and it's a mysterious new technology. One that deweaponizes the language of self-constriction, one for all the noises that noise leaves out.
“Aleatory alterity” or astral projection? “Reentranced echolalia”? Sheer verbal articulations at the limits of desire and expression, “full of trans / verse wavenoise.”. - Mónica de la Torre
POEMS BY JESSICA BAER •
"Earth Wedging Light" in Pinwheel
"Deer Black Out" in Prelude
Two poems in Fruita Pulpa
Three poems in Horse Less Review (with audio!)
JOURNALS
• Gazing for yr heart, if we blew, Go by stars, and very august [The Tiny Mag]
• Harbor Lines [Baest Journal]
• Perception's Toxic [BathHouse Journal]
• Griefmouth and The Powers of Horror [Black Sun Lit] (Print)
• Kill/Switch and "Working Title" [The Boiler Journal]
• Mask Generators / Weather Machines [Bone Bouquet] (Print)
• Kintsugi Variations and After Mareshiver [Deluge Journal]
• Crystalmine [Dream Pop Journal]
• In Pilsen and We Crammed [Fog Machine]
• Deleuze Fucked My Mother and The Church of Cattle Entrails [Fruita Pulp]
• Pegasus My Mother and 'Mareshiver' and Foreclosure Rodeo [Horse Less Review]
• Mineral Mnemonics [Leveler]
• Earth Wedging Light and Mineralremitting::radioact [Pinwheel Journal]
• a lovely chord / it ends [Potluck Mag]
• Deer Black Out [Prelude Mag]
• The Cretaceous Periods [Pulpmouth]
• I was never more and misconstructed you and The angels the angels and & Don't You Miss the Dancehall [Reality Beach]
• My Quora and Desynch [Queen Mob's Teahouse]
• Antler Axile [Sugar Mule]
• Excerpt from shortlisted finalist manuscript Midwestern Infinity Doctrine [Tarpaulin Sky Magazine]
• We Begin To Tessellate [Voicemail Poems]
ART CRITICISM
• Time filling a room like water [The Collaborative Center for Storm, Space, & Seismic Research]
Jessica Baer received their MFA from Brown University in 2017. They have published a chapbook, Holodeck One (Magic Helicopter Press, 2017), and their work has been featured in journals such as Pinwheel, Prelude Mag, Horse Less Press, and Bone Bouquet. They live anywhere and they love horses.
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