DOGSMIND
by Alex Tretbar
“I do not phony, and I do not knowingly why. But my life behaves as though it is a farthing, neither here nor I.”
Dogsmind is a poem-novella ouroboros without ending or beginning. It digests techniques and motifs from Joyce’s Ulysses to render a freakish beauty from its tech-addled, hallucinatory tale of friendship, betrayal, addiction, and death. Trapped between doom and hilarity, its narrative of The Spokesperson/“I”, Ripjohn, The Requestor, and Patches plays out alongside a personified and lethal History who reminds us, “I am also tomorrow.” Somewhere in the center of this labyrinth, we find a freezing dog suffering the technologies of empire who implants a desire in “I” to speak for those History would erase. But in this book’s ever-repeating nightmare, the very conditions of speech become inseparable from madness.
-Shipping in October 2026
-61 pp. / 8.5” by 8.5”, stab-stapled
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read excerpts in Mercury Firs, Grotto, and Capgras
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$12
PDF available soon
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Alex Tretbar is a Midwestern writer and educator. He is the author of the chapbooks toofarwandered (Tilted House, 2026), According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025), and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). Recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Annulet, Cleveland Review of Books, Fence, Grotto, Hearsay, [light study], P-QUEUE, Seam Allowance, and others. Alongside students, alumni, and faculty from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he teaches creative writing at Chillicothe Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Missouri.