“Jagged, Playful, & Insistently Strange”
Since the author—for excellent reasons we needn’t go into here—was reluctant to solicit blurbs for Turpentine Headache, we at Ristretto thought we’d let ChatGPT (which we’d heard of but had never tried before) have a crack at fashioning a review or two.
Well, it didn’t disappoint—that is, until its productions were scrutinized.
Our initial delight was soon replaced by uneasiness. We Googled several suspiciously polished sentences and discovered that they had been lifted, unaltered and without attribution, from various sources: The New York Times, The Yale Review, The Contemporary Poetry Review, and reviews by A. E. Stallings, Tony Hoagland, Helen Vendler, Adam Kirsch in The New Republic, and others besides.
We’d seen enough to conclude that someone’s diligence was overdue—and it wasn’t ours. Clearly this approach was doomed.
But we still needed some kind of P.R. material. We believe strongly in this book’s originality and charm and want to help it find its niche in the crowded literary landscape.
We realized that A.I. is spectacularly devoid of the capacity to think, feel, judge, or actually understand language—the classic description of computers as “very, very fast and very, very stupid” came to mind. But its astonishing speed meant that the rules it follows could be tweaked many times in a matter of minutes.
So why not give it another chance?
The First Attempt
We decided to ask the jiffy (if iffy) app to do something it’s inarguably good at: collation and pattern recognition.
We uploaded a handful of poems from the book and asked it simply to characterize them. It replied:
Across the sequence, the poems share a grammar of erosion—lexical, perceptual, and ontological. Their fractured syntax and compressed diction embody the very instability they describe.
The collection reads as a polyphonic atlas of unstable perception. These poems obsess over whether an image precedes or follows its articulation, whether perception is a discovery or an imposition.
The driving force is a fascination with the fragile surfaces of experience, expressed through language that remains jagged, playful, and insistently strange.
Fair enough, we said. It’s no worse than a lot of windy pronunciamentos adorning the covers of poetry books. A “polyphonic atlas” of just about anything would certainly pique a reader’s interest.
And anyone who isn’t fascinated with the fragile surfaces of experience probably should be—though we felt a wave of vertigo at the question of whether perception is a discovery or an imposition, as if we were hallucinating a cage fight between Hume and Kant.
Still, we felt that the lyric individuality of the poems—the plexus of vivencies that make them worth reading—was being bulldozed into a generic heap of jargon.
How, we wondered, were we going to inveigle this prodigiously energetic pseudo-intelligence into performing a task with no hint of any particular result embedded in the question?
The Hypothetical Test
We decided to give it something like a Torrance Test for bumptious little C.P.U.s, whose doting progenitors believe their offspring belong in the most exclusive gifted-and-talented academy in town.
(Dream on.)
We asked:
If this book of poems were a terrestrial landscape, which specific place would it be?
2.117 seconds later, it answered:
Based on the imagery, texture, and layered complexity of the book of poems you shared, if it were a terrestrial landscape it most closely resembles the Atacama Desert in Chile:
a place of striking, desolate beauty, fragile life, and layered textures, mirroring the poems’ interplay of chaos, precision, and gestural complexity.
Quite an apt analogy, we couldn’t help agreeing—one we were pretty sure the author would secretly be pleased by.
So we fed it a few more hypotheticals.
If This Book Were…
A Movie Star
Tilda Swinton
Chameleon-like versatility
Otherworldly and enigmatic
Graceful yet unsettling
Intellectual and experimental aura
A star who embodies intelligence, elegance, and a hint of the uncanny—perfectly matching the poems’ layered, elusive, and dynamic character.
A Rock Group
Radiohead
Experimental and unpredictable
Complex layering
Emotional intensity and intellectual depth
Atmospheric and immersive
Playful experimentation
A group that embodies innovation, complexity, and emotional resonance.
A Food
A molecular gastronomy tasting menu
Food for the adventurous palate, where each element is carefully considered yet allowed to surprise.
A Sport
Rock climbing (especially free soloing on a jagged cliff)
Complex navigation and strategy
Balance of precision and risk
Engagement with natural forces
Physical and mental intensity
Beauty in the challenge
A sport of risk, skill, attention, and flow.
A Pet
A Siberian Husky
At this point the perky chatterbox asked, unprompted, whether we’d like five additional pets that could metaphorically embody facets of the book.
We said sure.
Octopus — fluid, intelligent, elusive
Raven — observant, mysterious, playful
Chameleon — constantly adapting its appearance
Fennec Fox — small, alert, agile
Seahorse — strange, delicate, ethereal
An Article of Clothing
A flowing patchwork kimono made of richly textured fabrics.
A City
Venice, Italy
Labyrinthine and layered: like the poems’ intricate imagery, Venice is a network of canals, alleys, and hidden corners.
Fluid and dynamic: tides, reflections, and constant motion.
History mixed with daily life: Gothic architecture, Renaissance art, and modern activity coexist.
Ethereal beauty and impermanence: fragile charm subject to the ebb and flow of time and tide.
A city of mystery, texture, and shifting perspectives.
The Summary
So there you have it.
Turpentine Headache is like Tilda Swinton rock-climbing in a kimono in the Atacama Desert with her husky and her octopus while listening to Radiohead and thinking about savoring a molecular gastronomy tasting menu the next time she’s in Venice.
Except it isn’t, really.
There’s no substitute for reading the book.
We—and ChatGPT—have done the best we can.
Or Have We?
After settling, rather glumly, on this dubious publicity plan, one of us said:
“You know, these Calypso poems, whatever else they are, are really short. I mean—how many people write nine-word stanzas and nothing but?”
Good point.
Maybe that simple insight was the key to an undiscovered market.
And before long—using our own intelligence as well as the artificial kind—we had knocked together some rather novel (we hoped) blurbage for an advertisement.
SPEED-READ THIS STUNNING COLLECTION
Pressed for time?
Hate long, meandering poetry?
No problem — this is your dream.
Each poem is ONLY 27 WORDS LONG and hits immediately.
You can read one in seconds, yet its images and textures linger long after you turn the page.
Perfect for:
“Jagged, Playful, & Insistently Strange”
Since the author—for excellent reasons we needn’t go into here—was reluctant to solicit blurbs for Turpentine Headache, we at Ristretto thought we’d let ChatGPT (which we’d heard of but had never tried before) have a crack at fashioning a review or two.
Well, it didn’t disappoint—that is, until its productions were scrutinized.
Our initial delight was soon replaced by uneasiness. We Googled several suspiciously polished sentences and discovered that they had been lifted, unaltered and without attribution, from various sources: The New York Times, The Yale Review, The Contemporary Poetry Review, and reviews by A. E. Stallings, Tony Hoagland, Helen Vendler, Adam Kirsch in The New Republic, and others besides.
We’d seen enough to conclude that someone’s diligence was overdue—and it wasn’t ours. Clearly this approach was doomed.
But we still needed some kind of P.R. material. We believe strongly in this book’s originality and charm and want to help it find its niche in the crowded literary landscape.
We realized that A.I. is spectacularly devoid of the capacity to think, feel, judge, or actually understand language—the classic description of computers as “very, very fast and very, very stupid” came to mind. But its astonishing speed meant that the rules it follows could be tweaked many times in a matter of minutes.
So why not give it another chance?
The First Attempt
We decided to ask the jiffy (if iffy) app to do something it’s inarguably good at: collation and pattern recognition.
We uploaded a handful of poems from the book and asked it simply to characterize them. It replied:
Across the sequence, the poems share a grammar of erosion—lexical, perceptual, and ontological. Their fractured syntax and compressed diction embody the very instability they describe.
The collection reads as a polyphonic atlas of unstable perception. These poems obsess over whether an image precedes or follows its articulation, whether perception is a discovery or an imposition.
The driving force is a fascination with the fragile surfaces of experience, expressed through language that remains jagged, playful, and insistently strange.
Fair enough, we said. It’s no worse than a lot of windy pronunciamentos adorning the covers of poetry books. A “polyphonic atlas” of just about anything would certainly pique a reader’s interest.
And anyone who isn’t fascinated with the fragile surfaces of experience probably should be—though we felt a wave of vertigo at the question of whether perception is a discovery or an imposition, as if we were hallucinating a cage fight between Hume and Kant.
Still, we felt that the lyric individuality of the poems—the plexus of vivencies that make them worth reading—was being bulldozed into a generic heap of jargon.
How, we wondered, were we going to inveigle this prodigiously energetic pseudo-intelligence into performing a task with no hint of any particular result embedded in the question?
The Hypothetical Test
We decided to give it something like a Torrance Test for bumptious little C.P.U.s, whose doting progenitors believe their offspring belong in the most exclusive gifted-and-talented academy in town.
(Dream on.)
We asked:
If this book of poems were a terrestrial landscape, which specific place would it be?
2.117 seconds later, it answered:
Based on the imagery, texture, and layered complexity of the book of poems you shared, if it were a terrestrial landscape it most closely resembles the Atacama Desert in Chile:
a place of striking, desolate beauty, fragile life, and layered textures, mirroring the poems’ interplay of chaos, precision, and gestural complexity.
Quite an apt analogy, we couldn’t help agreeing—one we were pretty sure the author would secretly be pleased by.
So we fed it a few more hypotheticals.
If This Book Were…
A Movie Star
Tilda Swinton
Chameleon-like versatility
Otherworldly and enigmatic
Graceful yet unsettling
Intellectual and experimental aura
A star who embodies intelligence, elegance, and a hint of the uncanny—perfectly matching the poems’ layered, elusive, and dynamic character.
A Rock Group
Radiohead
Experimental and unpredictable
Complex layering
Emotional intensity and intellectual depth
Atmospheric and immersive
Playful experimentation
A group that embodies innovation, complexity, and emotional resonance.
A Food
A molecular gastronomy tasting menu
Food for the adventurous palate, where each element is carefully considered yet allowed to surprise.
A Sport
Rock climbing (especially free soloing on a jagged cliff)
Complex navigation and strategy
Balance of precision and risk
Engagement with natural forces
Physical and mental intensity
Beauty in the challenge
A sport of risk, skill, attention, and flow.
A Pet
A Siberian Husky
At this point the perky chatterbox asked, unprompted, whether we’d like five additional pets that could metaphorically embody facets of the book.
We said sure.
Octopus — fluid, intelligent, elusive
Raven — observant, mysterious, playful
Chameleon — constantly adapting its appearance
Fennec Fox — small, alert, agile
Seahorse — strange, delicate, ethereal
An Article of Clothing
A flowing patchwork kimono made of richly textured fabrics.
A City
Venice, Italy
Labyrinthine and layered: like the poems’ intricate imagery, Venice is a network of canals, alleys, and hidden corners.
Fluid and dynamic: tides, reflections, and constant motion.
History mixed with daily life: Gothic architecture, Renaissance art, and modern activity coexist.
Ethereal beauty and impermanence: fragile charm subject to the ebb and flow of time and tide.
A city of mystery, texture, and shifting perspectives.
The Summary
So there you have it.
Turpentine Headache is like Tilda Swinton rock-climbing in a kimono in the Atacama Desert with her husky and her octopus while listening to Radiohead and thinking about savoring a molecular gastronomy tasting menu the next time she’s in Venice.
Except it isn’t, really.
There’s no substitute for reading the book.
We—and ChatGPT—have done the best we can.
Or Have We?
After settling, rather glumly, on this dubious publicity plan, one of us said:
“You know, these Calypso poems, whatever else they are, are really short. I mean—how many people write nine-word stanzas and nothing but?”
Good point.
Maybe that simple insight was the key to an undiscovered market.
And before long—using our own intelligence as well as the artificial kind—we had knocked together some rather novel (we hoped) blurbage for an advertisement.
SPEED-READ THIS STUNNING COLLECTION
Pressed for time?
Hate long, meandering poetry?
No problem — this is your dream.
Each poem is ONLY 27 WORDS LONG and hits immediately.
You can read one in seconds, yet its images and textures linger long after you turn the page.
Perfect for:
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