My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites

“What if I said I came from the future and the world had ended, and it was important to write down how your mind collided with itself?” the incisive second book from Corfman (Luxury, Blue Lace) inquires. The poet builds a world around this question through a series of prose entries that observe with brutal clarity how mundane realities intersect with gender dysphoria, queerness, human cruelty, mass catastrophe, and the “quotidian effect of pain.” Corfman is interested in how the external self moves through the world—how people perceive and are perceived, how feeling travels through the body—as well as absence. “A feeling is different each time but that does not mean it is absent a form,” they write. The speaker experiences their own desire for transformation: an eye blurs with cataracts, nail polish and fabrics are donned, and there is a struggle to accept the imprints their body leaves and “the paths I send outwards.” In this gentle and devastating record of a life, Corfman highlights and distorts the real to transmit a remarkable interior world, intricate with questions of selfhood, affect, and the mortality that transforms and binds humanity. (Sept.)