A Review of Aodhán Ridenour’s “Little Bit Weird” CHAPBOOK (Bottlecap Press, 2025)

Here are poems with a confessional directness reminiscent of the “speak now or forever hold your tongue” approach to poetry explored in Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. In the acknowledgments of Little Bit Weird, Aodhán Ridenour writes, “I hardly wrote any of these poems.” With a youthful Beat sensibility, Ridenour’s mind, in the act of composing, channels what Denise Levertov calls the “organic” or what Charles Olson designates as “projective.” In “Projective Verse,” Olson likens a poem to a “kinetic” assemblage, or, an energy obtained from some external source. He also offers a kind of equation for projective verse: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.” A similar kind of projective, self-conscious unfolding takes place in many of Ridenour’s poems—especially in “Black Pepper”: “I made sixteen mistakes today, / give or take, / and yet I sit here happilly, / inhaling her black pepper, / hapilly misspelled.” True, the word “happily” is intentionally misspelled twice in this poem, but the adjective could also be describing the “I” of this poem. A self misspelled (or scrambled) by desire (“my happiness, / the commencement of / my emptiness”).

The weirdness of the love poems of Little Bit Weird rests in Ridenour’s use of mythical and nautical language (“Its bow and stern / must bend to touch the edges of our bodies”), kinetic instant-by-instant self-transcendence (“Yet I have held my tongue, / a petal from the flowers in my head”) and a desire for communication in a tech-choked world (“I simply need to find another / Wi-fi mic-radio wave / to reach my antenna / in lieu of my attempts / to share my GHz with you.” From WhatsApp to Tinder to ChatGPT, Little Bit Weird is more than love poems, it’s a portrait of a writer in 2025: the way “fingers slide across the screen.” For fans of John Yau’s Borrowed Love Poems or Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords volumes.