Tumbling from one speaker to the next, Matthew Rohrer’s dreamlike novel-in-verse harkens back to a time when poetic language was used, principally, to tell stories. It is experimental and strange but not in a way that alienates its readers. Whether Rohrer’s characters are riding the F train in midtown Manhattan, high in nineteenth-century France, or fending off robot bigfeet, his masterful attention to detail and rhythm absorbs and engages. Each narrative emerges from the one that precedes it, like a Russian nesting doll, producing a sensation of spacious expansion and laying bare the manner by which narratives absorb and give birth to each other. This is a book of trapdoors and weird trips and special delights.
—The Believer, Believer Book Award Notification