Allow Me to Slip on Something a Little More Hypocycloid

PRROBLEM covers are printed on a Kelsey Excelsior Model O letterpress. Books are bound using Chicago screws.

Christine Kelly's Allow Me to Slip on Something a Little More Hypocycloid puts geometry to shame. Like a curve rolling on the inside of a circumference, “my dispersal is at your disposal," Kelly writes. Hypocycloids aren't just graphical representations—they're spatial unsystems, vibed out significations, sites of performance.

Here, words do not stay in their lanes; they revel in signal and contour, replace questions with better questions. Variably flat and fortissimo, panoramic and specific, Kelly’s poems dramatize “bonfire continuity error” and “assonant alien astro-liberations,” asking us to "register again what has been registered slightly."

Allow Me performs recombinatory and deductive sleights of hand wherein software instructions, punchlines, academic jargon, and quotidian speech can try on one another's costumes. In the vaudevillian tradition of an abracadabra-ist, this book comes fully Verfremdungs bedecked.

Allow Me is a deliriously madcap tumult of high-octane language whose sense apparatus knows no bounds. Proceeding from an absent center, these roving poems joyride in search of what hides in one’s unconscious, while posing the loaded question: “what am I being invited not to see?” Filtered through philosophy, advertisement lingo, and improvisational comedy, Christine Kelly makes an ontological inquiry into our mediated reality of social coding, flickering screens, and very material earth. Allow Me deploys the frisson of cognitive pleasure in this bravura collection of poems. The results are electrifying. —Brenda Iijima

Christine Kelly's poems in Allow Me to Slip on Something a Little More Hypocycloid strike me as having been written from the last standing segment of independent consciousness at the end of a chain of agreements to be overwritten no willful being ever actually bought into. And so, having absorbed all this aggressive faux-linguistic intention from countless angles for years, Kelly's poems convert the mono-surface of this absurd and violent assault into something somehow deadpan and ineffable at the same time. There is a binding sense of humor at work here—one willing to admit you into the mind frame the external world performs itself constantly to undo. And one that doesn't ever imagine itself apart from these forces. Which is terrifying, if you want that to be, but accurate, and human, and incredibly moving in its recognitions and levels of care. —Anselm Berrigan

A hypocycloid is the curve formed when a small circle rolls inside a larger circle, where the curve obtained is a multi-spiked star. Hypocycloid is a precise diagramming of the absurd and the arcane, an outline of the contours of contemporary experience. Kelly—part conjuror, part observer—traces this silhouette of the interior with an uncanny wit. For those who seek to probe the boundaries of self and world and who long for the ultimate spell to dismantle artifice and pink up something more chaotic and wondrous, Allow Me to Slip on Something A Little More Hypocycloid’s liminal spaces offer meditations on the sour rituals of everyday life, all while turning on them with the sure permissiveness of vengeance. In this absorbing collection, “the blooper reel that tells us what it is” is a more accurate measure of vitality than the score itself—and in this domain, we are alive. —Daisy Atterbury

Administrative kink at its ripest. Brutal and dewy, slapstick sutures to cover the boundary between having and being a body. A shim wedged against the mannered deployment of functional language. I am so grateful to have these poems near at hand. —Luke Fischbeck

Christine Kelly’s Allow Me to Slip on Something a Little More Hypocycloid brilliantly hijacks the human perceptual apparatus—as ready-made inference network, as web-safe color palette, as morphed systems architecture. What do we see from inside the system called consciousness? A little bit of polite amnesia, detergent (as mirror), assless pants, balconette bras, and hot for bangle. In Allow Me, Kelly debugs the human sensory soundtrack like a custom body pillow. It’s glowing like your custom Hex Color #660033. —Tan Lin