A Dash as Long as the Earth's Orbit

“the last dream I was / awake for I wore what / sleep keeps from me” is how the first poem in Dave Brennan’s edifying chapbook A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit ends and the rest of the volume holds to that ethereal premise. Namechecking Pauline Oliveros, James Blake, and Edmund Jabés, among others, the work in A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit revels in atmospheric idiosyncrasy, with the prose-particle-poem being Brennan’s primary mode of enlightenment. A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit is a chapbook that this reader wishes were a full-length collection—the book ends too soon and my only recourse was to start it all over again.

—Jeff Alessandrelli, author of Fur Not Light 

A synesthesia’d bundle of senses. Sound the great dictator. Dave Brennan plops us in a room and makes us feel it. A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit is an ambient song made textual and a rejection of its own translation. Brennan leans into the uncertainty of space—of silence, of time—and refuses to make sense of it. Instead, he gives a blueprint for feeling it, living it. We hang in that indefinable click between silence and sound (“The vibration traveled within. I can’t pin it down. I lay no claim to the devotion felt. Ungovernable, irreducible”). Between what we record and what we leave behind. Between presence and absence. Between genres. As visual as it is sonic, its form spreads itself out, unsure if it’s tugging us deeper into the page or back out into the world. A truly hybrid work, it’s as much a consideration of ecocriticism as it is aestheticism, and expertly merges the two to make sense of the self and its impulse to make itself permanent (“my sight, my paper pupil, skins me with the hot ash of what I haven’t penned”). A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit reverberates and reverberates and reverberates.

 —Olivia Muenz, author of I Feel Fine