The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

the abyss of non-belief, the vacuum, cannot be filled with stuff

a face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly;

the real men—who are themselves in fact perpetual boys, since America is adolescence without end—had to differentiate themselves with violence,

There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative.