words toward ‘friends with everyone’ by Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding (Action Books 2024)

friends with everyone
Gunnar Wærness
Translated by Gabriel Gudding
Action Books, 2024

I don’t know what language I speak in. Someone says there is a fingerprint that makes all of us all. I don’t know what to say about being unique. I think you must be an accomplice to the word, or be a crime within it. Anyway, if you’re looking to reconstruct any scene, if you’re looking for a thing that does not leave before scarring with abandon, then friends with everyone by Gunnar Wærness, translated by Gabriel Gudding as if they were an owl made to live inside the sun, might be the lost book of anatomy, the gutghost bible, that your now-life is seeing and seeking. Full of removal musics, muscle amnesias, bleak holidays, resurrection holes, and braided nostalgias of the woven failure of a puppet future, the propulsive and negated verse of friends with everyone takes rock bottom to new depths and asks the recency nepotism of the fakeass current to surrender to a higher mantra and to the pop-sorrow of paused repetition might syntax reset the rhythm of oceans and borders and give the anti-syllable of empire a place to eat quietly and sing through its pseudo-therapeutic fast food glories of hunger’s gospel. Or something, or nothing. My breath caught me, is what I mean. And was taught, unteachably, to gasp.

~

reflection by Barton Smock