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Vexations
A mother and daughter journey together through a strange speculative world in this experimental book-length poem.
Annelyse Gelman’s book-length poem Vexations is a surreal, glitchy meditation on empathy, ecology, and precarity. Throughout the book winds a narrative about a mother and daughter as they move through a world of social and economic collapse in search of a post-capitalist safe haven. All the while, they also navigate a condition that affects the daughter’s empathic abilities, making her vulnerable to emotional contagion.
Vexations is titled and structured after Erik Satie’s composition of the same name, a piece that requires patience, endurance, and concentration from both its audience and its players. Similarly, Gelman’s Vexations employs repetition and variation to engage the reader’s attention. Hers is an ambient poetry, drawing on the aesthetic qualities of drone music and sampling voices and sounds to create a lush literary backdrop filled with pulsing psychedelic detail.
Annelyse Gelman’s book-length poem Vexations is a surreal, glitchy meditation on empathy, ecology, and precarity. Throughout the book winds a narrative about a mother and daughter as they move through a world of social and economic collapse in search of a post-capitalist safe haven. All the while, they also navigate a condition that affects the daughter’s empathic abilities, making her vulnerable to emotional contagion.
Vexations is titled and structured after Erik Satie’s composition of the same name, a piece that requires patience, endurance, and concentration from both its audience and its players. Similarly, Gelman’s Vexations employs repetition and variation to engage the reader’s attention. Hers is an ambient poetry, drawing on the aesthetic qualities of drone music and sampling voices and sounds to create a lush literary backdrop filled with pulsing psychedelic detail.
- GenresPoetry
54 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2023
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194 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 17, 2024
Original. Explores dissonance and consonance in a book length poem
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May 12, 2024A long form poem.
An interesting experiment, though the shifts in tone will have your n-speed reader's transmission constantly in motion. Unpredictable lineation and stanza composition foster the slippage.
Snip:
The oxygenation of the Earth was a catastrophe, said the man in the pony mask
The oxygenation of the Earth was a genocide, we all said back
A shaded sapling borrowed sugar from its friends
Our bodies remembered pathogens we had encountered before
Our bilateral symmetry gave us crude confidence
We liked the taste of fats and sugars most of all
That stanza particularly resonates after reading "Fast Food Forever: How McHaters Lost the Culture War" by Brian Gallagher 12 May 2024.
An interesting experiment, though the shifts in tone will have your n-speed reader's transmission constantly in motion. Unpredictable lineation and stanza composition foster the slippage.
Snip:
The oxygenation of the Earth was a catastrophe, said the man in the pony mask
The oxygenation of the Earth was a genocide, we all said back
A shaded sapling borrowed sugar from its friends
Our bodies remembered pathogens we had encountered before
Our bilateral symmetry gave us crude confidence
We liked the taste of fats and sugars most of all
That stanza particularly resonates after reading "Fast Food Forever: How McHaters Lost the Culture War" by Brian Gallagher 12 May 2024.
January 9, 2024
How is it you would tell the story of ending. The world ending. Your world ending. But not the end, instead a process for ending. Because whether it’s a general apocalypse or a personal tragedy, there’s still so much living that has to happen as you move towards the end. “Ending,” in Gelman’s book is more like affect. Think of a book addressing the COVID pandemic, especially during those first few months. The strange stance everyone had about an ending. But an ending to what, exactly? I don’t know. But I can remember the disorientation. And that is what ending is in Vexations. Disorientation as impetus, but also a general direction to go. Where is an ending for the story we’re living through? How would a story tell an ending? Is it a poem that would be better suited to the ending? I’m interested. I’m interested, because the poet has no way of knowing the extent of interest she has. It’s a very desperate way to live.
And it creates an unending interest in the topic. Expressed and tightly interwoven with the book’s method. Or should I call it her style? Or her stance toward apocalypse? The book’s language is so impacted with the situation. It’s like imagine Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it’s a mother and daughter the whole time. And it’s a series of single-line observations—observations so incidental to the moment, they could be called “mere observations.” Juxtaposed to these observations are moments when the poet half-reflects, which is part of the book’s method. There’s no time to reflect. It’s too painful to reflect.
Which speaks to the book’s larger structure. There is a series of events. But the poem isn’t as interested in a causal accounting for one event leading to another. Instead, it’s what the poet observes while in any given moment. Her daughter drawing the mane of a horse. The color of night. Moments that can be accounted for in a single line, and each line braiding to the next in a lyric fashion, but it’s a braid with stray threads. A statement could go on (and some statements do stretch a bit further into the next line), but most don’t. It’s a style emblematic of the poem’s current moment. There is no way to capture what any amount of time really does.
Or which topic the momentary observation relates to. Her daughter as a topic. Her perspective on the world, as a woman, and a mother. Survival. It feels like an extension of the current malaise-mixed-with-terror that is the US’s political “dialogue.” What are you supposed to be when fighting feels like the consistency of an ending? Is it just what the middle of an ending consists of?
And it creates an unending interest in the topic. Expressed and tightly interwoven with the book’s method. Or should I call it her style? Or her stance toward apocalypse? The book’s language is so impacted with the situation. It’s like imagine Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it’s a mother and daughter the whole time. And it’s a series of single-line observations—observations so incidental to the moment, they could be called “mere observations.” Juxtaposed to these observations are moments when the poet half-reflects, which is part of the book’s method. There’s no time to reflect. It’s too painful to reflect.
Which speaks to the book’s larger structure. There is a series of events. But the poem isn’t as interested in a causal accounting for one event leading to another. Instead, it’s what the poet observes while in any given moment. Her daughter drawing the mane of a horse. The color of night. Moments that can be accounted for in a single line, and each line braiding to the next in a lyric fashion, but it’s a braid with stray threads. A statement could go on (and some statements do stretch a bit further into the next line), but most don’t. It’s a style emblematic of the poem’s current moment. There is no way to capture what any amount of time really does.
Or which topic the momentary observation relates to. Her daughter as a topic. Her perspective on the world, as a woman, and a mother. Survival. It feels like an extension of the current malaise-mixed-with-terror that is the US’s political “dialogue.” What are you supposed to be when fighting feels like the consistency of an ending? Is it just what the middle of an ending consists of?
June 11, 2024
An extraordinary book. It's a single poem, 220 sestets--a narrative poem, perhaps, although that may be assuming too much. Something apocalyptically catastrophic has happened, ecologically or epidemiologically, but we don't know what it is. Somewhat as in Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet, we learn little to nothing about the actual catastrophe but experience instead its effects: removals and dislocations, the vanishing of things long taken for granted, improvised communities, strained relationships.
We do not get a plot, exactly, and thanks to the unvarying regularity of the sestets and some recurring details (a song called "Elsewhere, Elsewhere," the word "creamy," a grasshopper that gets killed) time seems to be standing still. Gelman mentions in a note that the poem was in part inspired by Eric Satie's "Vexations," a one-page piece of piano music that is to be repeated 840 times, with performances taking as long as 20-some hours. Gelman's Vexations has a similarly mesmerizing here-we-go-round-again feel.
Part of the trance is that the text has no periods, making the reader's parsing of individual lines somewhat mobile. Sometimes two consecutive lines will seem to be syntactically and semantically entangled, but just as often they seem to be non sequiturs, and sometimes they flicker back and forth, now waves, now particles...an Ashberyean effect that kept things from ever settling down into predictability (that great hazard of post-apocalyptic fictions).
We know time is passing, though, because the narrator gives birth to a daughter on the first page and by the last page the daughter is (I think) on the verge of puberty. The narrator's valiant attempts to honor the duties of parenthood in the wake of civilization's collapse might remind you a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but making it a mother-daughter story places it in quite another key, with (for me) the Persephone archetype looming awfully on the final page.
Quite a book. Hard to put down, and not just because it has no end-stop punctuation.
We do not get a plot, exactly, and thanks to the unvarying regularity of the sestets and some recurring details (a song called "Elsewhere, Elsewhere," the word "creamy," a grasshopper that gets killed) time seems to be standing still. Gelman mentions in a note that the poem was in part inspired by Eric Satie's "Vexations," a one-page piece of piano music that is to be repeated 840 times, with performances taking as long as 20-some hours. Gelman's Vexations has a similarly mesmerizing here-we-go-round-again feel.
Part of the trance is that the text has no periods, making the reader's parsing of individual lines somewhat mobile. Sometimes two consecutive lines will seem to be syntactically and semantically entangled, but just as often they seem to be non sequiturs, and sometimes they flicker back and forth, now waves, now particles...an Ashberyean effect that kept things from ever settling down into predictability (that great hazard of post-apocalyptic fictions).
We know time is passing, though, because the narrator gives birth to a daughter on the first page and by the last page the daughter is (I think) on the verge of puberty. The narrator's valiant attempts to honor the duties of parenthood in the wake of civilization's collapse might remind you a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but making it a mother-daughter story places it in quite another key, with (for me) the Persephone archetype looming awfully on the final page.
Quite a book. Hard to put down, and not just because it has no end-stop punctuation.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 26, 2024
Very unusual for me to want to read a poem that takes up the whole book. I can think of only three other poets I’ve done this for, T.S. Elliot, Coleridge and Ashbery,(who filled up the book with three poems). This poem went on for 44 pages and was excellent. The book was sent to me by the Academy of American Poets.
January 29, 2024
explosive. an instant new favorite
October 27, 2024
“Disturbing,” a critic might say, and rightly so, as is Erik Satie’s musical composition that inspired this poem. Cryptically condemnatory of the Anthropocene and its excesses, this book-length lament addresses an array of vexations: artificial “intelligence,” Big Pharma, fake news, gun culture, petrochemical haze, pixelated reality, toxic toothpaste, ecological disaster. “The wreckage of history,” someone wrote, referring to the present. “We didn’t know what to do with our garbage,” went the saying.
Favorite Passages:
“Besides, we are not communicating so much
As auditioning sentences for each other” (5)
“I had the feeling I should start collecting something
I had the feeling toxins were accumulating in my body
I had the feeling my personal history was indistinguishable from toxicity
Smog spawned dark murmurations over suburbs
Events slid into each other, marvelously promiscuous
Pronouns sludged through me, entirely inadequate” (9)
“She believed that, ultimately, the lucky would die and
The rest of us would be haunted by the knowledge
Of what we had to do to survive” (18)
“We tried not to squander our trauma
Our descendants would inherit it” (22)
“Looking at pixels made me think in pixels” (30)
“The word ‘wildlife’ sounded exotic and almost plausible” (39)
“As for wisdom, we didn’t know what to do with it” [like garbage] (40)
“What quality of life was worth preserving?” (45)
Favorite Passages:
“Besides, we are not communicating so much
As auditioning sentences for each other” (5)
“I had the feeling I should start collecting something
I had the feeling toxins were accumulating in my body
I had the feeling my personal history was indistinguishable from toxicity
Smog spawned dark murmurations over suburbs
Events slid into each other, marvelously promiscuous
Pronouns sludged through me, entirely inadequate” (9)
“She believed that, ultimately, the lucky would die and
The rest of us would be haunted by the knowledge
Of what we had to do to survive” (18)
“We tried not to squander our trauma
Our descendants would inherit it” (22)
“Looking at pixels made me think in pixels” (30)
“The word ‘wildlife’ sounded exotic and almost plausible” (39)
“As for wisdom, we didn’t know what to do with it” [like garbage] (40)
“What quality of life was worth preserving?” (45)
Read
November 4, 2025I read almost zero poetry but liked a stanza of this I saw quoted somewhere and decided to try it. I enjoyed a lot of the language, some of which felt like astute commentary on the world.I appreciated the repeated callback lines throughout. And then there were some places the language felt almost Brutalist?
I think I did not follow the plot. I'll admit being confused about the speculative angle, and it's highly likely I misunderstood things, but I took this for the mother having poor mental health while the daughter developed a chronic disease and/ or sensory processing disorder, and pursued experimental treatments when traditional medicine didn't work. I suppose I thought poetry was nearly always meant to be interpreted to be understood, and I didn't read anything I couldn't parse as either a metaphor or poetic license, but perhaps I ought to have taken it more literally? 🤷♀️ Or potentially I have a darker sense of how one might describe today's world than some of the reviewers?
"It was hard to forget new information, even if you learned it was false
You had to remember the information and that it was false
It was like walking up a tempered-glass staircase into a cloud
From which there was no wisdom one could carry down"
I think I did not follow the plot. I'll admit being confused about the speculative angle, and it's highly likely I misunderstood things, but I took this for the mother having poor mental health while the daughter developed a chronic disease and/ or sensory processing disorder, and pursued experimental treatments when traditional medicine didn't work. I suppose I thought poetry was nearly always meant to be interpreted to be understood, and I didn't read anything I couldn't parse as either a metaphor or poetic license, but perhaps I ought to have taken it more literally? 🤷♀️ Or potentially I have a darker sense of how one might describe today's world than some of the reviewers?
"We felt we were at the beginning of something
We already essentially felt we were already essentially doomed"
July 18, 2023
Whatever it is you've been trying to say, or hear, can probably be found in the interior stoppages and outbound etymologies of Annelyse Gelman's spiritually forwarded Vexations in which the current devours the recent but goes on to imagine that it’s eaten a de-aged now and so becomes terrified of the present. Born invented, it ended so many times I ran out of weeping. Rooted in the everyday that has to relive with itself, it's a hard book to finish once. I found things because things were everywhere and I found things because they disappeared twice. With its snapshots of acceptance, vacated visions, and exiting accumulations, the verse makes of the moment an inquiry that speech isn't normally asked to speak for. A password, here, seems to know our password and Gelman creates access from a de-awed strangeness and discovers elsewhere as the anchor of locale. It looks like the world. It looks like my misunderstanding of the world. Illusions offer safe passage to holograms. Mirages aid in the evacuation of hallucinations. I look sometimes at my children as data sets of worry. I can't say how briefly I long for each. Vexations gives measure, and leaves one with a closeness glowing for the losses of its following.
November 21, 2023
I really liked the "worldbuilding" and apathetic/resigned mood of the text (the embodied ecological terror and wonder reminded me a bit of Todd Hayne's Safe). There's an interesting experiment in repetition here, but I could never find much of a satisfying rhythm in the stanza/line sequencing. Vexations' narrative of societal decay and rupture is moving, but its poetic qualities never fully grabbed me. The images and rhythms were... unevenly persuasive. The language felt strange and banal at once, very alienating like Anna Burn's Milkman. I know that's a novel, but this reminded me of experimental prose more than poetry. Not that that's a bad thing per se, more power to Gelman for pushing boundaries. For what it's worth, I don't think my rating really reflects how intriguing the book is. Many individual stanzas grabbed me. Here's one:
Have you ever watched a child develop terror?
Narrative comes over her like the violet hour at the end of an endless evening...
It was hard to forget new information, even if you learned it was false
You had to remember the information and that it was false
It was like walking up a tempered-glass staircase into a cloud
From which there was no wisdom one could carry down (pp. 10)
Have you ever watched a child develop terror?
Narrative comes over her like the violet hour at the end of an endless evening...
It was hard to forget new information, even if you learned it was false
You had to remember the information and that it was false
It was like walking up a tempered-glass staircase into a cloud
From which there was no wisdom one could carry down (pp. 10)
November 14, 2023
3.5 stars. This is a unique, book-length poem modeled after an unsettling piece of classical music of the same title. The classical piece is just one sheet of music, but the composer’s instructions say it should be played 840 times over. The poem plays on this idea of repetition and variation. It’s a little tough to get into and reads much like the cryptic curiosities of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. But after about 12 pages the poem teaches you how to read it and provides a few loose narrative threads of a mother and daughter character. The start is before the daughter’s birth, then there is a sequence of childhood illness and hospital procedures. Then the final sequence finds the mother and daughter in a curious cult-like community. One could even read it as a post-apocalyptic community given the ecological menace built up in imagery. Rather than feeling emotionally moved, I feel energized in putting a puzzle together or pondering the different narrative interpretations and themes. This was an enjoyable book to book-club, and I like it better after discussion.
April 6, 2024
This didn't hit the spot for me couple of pieces and parts stand out:
"To make room, I committed the first page of the economics textbook to memory
People always want more, no matter how much they have already"
(until they don't of course either by choice or medicated states) It is always a choice to want, and literally to continue to exist you have to want another breath, another heart beat, another second of existence.
"I ate the apple, and the apple tree cried out"
This was placed as though this was hurting the tree. Of course the tree created this to literally spread its seeds from the mobile class of animalia.
Perhaps these unexamined "insights" will work for some but for me, eh.
"To make room, I committed the first page of the economics textbook to memory
People always want more, no matter how much they have already"
(until they don't of course either by choice or medicated states) It is always a choice to want, and literally to continue to exist you have to want another breath, another heart beat, another second of existence.
"I ate the apple, and the apple tree cried out"
This was placed as though this was hurting the tree. Of course the tree created this to literally spread its seeds from the mobile class of animalia.
Perhaps these unexamined "insights" will work for some but for me, eh.
January 6, 2024
We tried not to squander our trauma
Our decedents would inherit it
I thought I was done with dystopian narratives, but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever really loved an epic poem the way I did this one. The language is sharp and universal, the story is ambitious, the feeling is deep, it’s compelling and clever.
Our decedents would inherit it
I thought I was done with dystopian narratives, but then again, I don’t think I’ve ever really loved an epic poem the way I did this one. The language is sharp and universal, the story is ambitious, the feeling is deep, it’s compelling and clever.
July 29, 2023
Lines so crystalline you'll need a new pickaxe or an old mirror to crack the glass. A book-length poem full of some of the most striking & surreal stanzas I’ve ever read. If Notley's The Descent of Alette was rewritten and then tossed into a blender.
January 26, 2024
you think you have read the detritus literature, the waste, the surplus, and then this comes along & suddenly all world is buzzing in your ears "i am ending i am ending"
besides, we were not communicating so much / as auditioning sentences for each other
besides, we were not communicating so much / as auditioning sentences for each other
November 7, 2025
Rapturous and eerily beautiful: creamy desserts, technocracy, bountiful italics, Balthus, psychic motherhood, and a dead planet swirl into an utterly unforgettable atmospheric, Eno-esque reflection on the collective grief of present existence.
October 8, 2023
there should be more book length poems! more speculative poems! more poems with lines that put words to a previously indescribable feeling!
February 20, 2024
Incredible ❣️
February 25, 2024
She sighed, she wilted, she lay down
August 22, 2024
i like reading this in Annelyse’s voice. it is only good if you appreciate poetry.
January 4, 2026
"She believed that, ultimately, the lucky would die, and
The rest of us would be haunted by the knowledge
Of what we had to do to survive"
The rest of us would be haunted by the knowledge
Of what we had to do to survive"
January 13, 2026
one of the best contemporary poems I’ve ever read (book length). climate techno dystopia in good verse. criminal it had sub-100 ratings, but that’s the state of contemporary poetry for you.
November 28, 2025
I read this in one morning on the patio of a hippie hostel on lake atitlan. A fitting place to be critiqued by this poem.
I loved the style itself. It was simple, not overly concerned with form or experimentation. It was a poem trying to say something, or trying to speculate about something (but is speculation really possible???), rather than exist for pleasure and refinement alone.
The relation of the word creamy was hilarious and disturbing and brilliant. The imagery of networks was timely, wisely entangling the digital and the vegetable. I was scared of how people disappeared into networks. I wanted to disappear too.
I’ll say that it felt a little bit academic to me. The poem was clearly critiquing academic writing, yet insisting on referencing all this work that seems pretty meaningless outside of academia. Phrases like “organs without bodies,” as well as plays on beneath the sidewalk the beach, drew me out from the poems world.
Of course, the poems world is also our world. What makes this poem so terrifying is that you never really enter it, it enters you, and you see that it’s already all around you. I guess, as a poem by an academic largely read by academics, this state of speculation/materiality excuses some of its academic-ness.
As I write this, I realize im just spewing bullshit. What matters is that this poem was both beautiful and arresting. Important for the times.
I loved the style itself. It was simple, not overly concerned with form or experimentation. It was a poem trying to say something, or trying to speculate about something (but is speculation really possible???), rather than exist for pleasure and refinement alone.
The relation of the word creamy was hilarious and disturbing and brilliant. The imagery of networks was timely, wisely entangling the digital and the vegetable. I was scared of how people disappeared into networks. I wanted to disappear too.
I’ll say that it felt a little bit academic to me. The poem was clearly critiquing academic writing, yet insisting on referencing all this work that seems pretty meaningless outside of academia. Phrases like “organs without bodies,” as well as plays on beneath the sidewalk the beach, drew me out from the poems world.
Of course, the poems world is also our world. What makes this poem so terrifying is that you never really enter it, it enters you, and you see that it’s already all around you. I guess, as a poem by an academic largely read by academics, this state of speculation/materiality excuses some of its academic-ness.
As I write this, I realize im just spewing bullshit. What matters is that this poem was both beautiful and arresting. Important for the times.
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