Put simply, Swinehart writes like Wallace, and this similarity reminds me of something Wallace once said in an interview with Richard Powers and John O’Brien about his ideal reader: “If stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody. Or like there’s somebody there. And I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me.”

if i / am left with lack, let it be / infinite, stretching further / than any man’s tongue

Sometimes I wake up to my own asthma / making small morse codes.

if you listen to duran duran while prancing around in nature and it's mostly overcast, you will feel like you're missing, but not loved enough to be put on a milk carton

Amazing fucking Grace, 

tell them 

how you’re production 

and I’m consumption

and how we mess around 

with gender roles 

Every morning I’d wake up, walk to Target and take a hangover dump in their nice clean bathroom

James served ten years in prison. His crucial impasse occurred a week after his life in the clink—under a neon sign that read Green Goddess.

It's easier for me to write a poem wherein I don't have to reassure my reader that I'm going to be okay, because I don't know the answer.

I know nothing
of what you’ve
become

“They don’t mind you sleeping with their wives?” I asked

Dash wore a jean jacket. He’s been wearing the same one for 15 years. The one in his Tinder picture. Dash, 29, one mile away. He sent me a screenshot of that, even though I had gone off online dating.

“Nice? Becca threw a drink in a guy's face for touching her ass last night, and you missed it because you were off talking to a nice guy?” She used air quotes around the word nice.

Jimmy was dead, and I had slept with all of the eligible coworkers.

I give them all a careful look and say things like, “Oooh, this is an extra special egg.”

Finally, one small voice from the tiniest of the nieces near the couch squeaked, “Fuck Gregor.”

Rehab was called Willow Springs

Now when I see someone hurting, from the loss of a lover, I never say, “You’ll get over it.”

There's some man on the internet and I think he's stalking [redacted] and [redacted] and [redacted]

The sensation of my stomach eating itself into a lovely inward slope sustains me. Keep smiling.

Rawdogging reality
isn’t for the faint of heart

Judging from popular discourse, the novel is in serious jeopardy, perhaps even an endangered artform, having been beset by a myriad of threats that include the advent of the digital age and a

Charlie would never have to be persuaded to eat pussy, I thought to myself as my date’s tongue fumbled with the flaps around my clit.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I was just feeling bad for myself. She was alive. We’re all so strange. It really breaks my heart sometimes. Marisol wanted a young man’s cock. I wanted to give her rose petals. Oh, how full of shit I was.

The following is an excerpt from Smith’s forthcoming acid western novel.

Clem is a worldly fella, but he’s not much for talking so I get fragments here and there. Got to the West from Russia the

J’s task was to ensure each of 3 men that they had a connection with a girl.

She had sent me a video of herself in the bath listening to Elvis, and I watched that over and over.