Allow Me To Slip On Something A Little More Hypocycloid

Author: Christine Kelly

Publisher: PRROBLEM Press (2025)

Christine Kelly's Allow Me to Slip on Something a Little More Hypocycloid puts geometry to shame. Like a curve rolling on the inside of a circumference, “my dispersal is at your disposal," Kelly writes. Hypocycloids aren't just graphical representations—they're spatial unsystems, vibed out significations, sites of performance.

Here, words do not stay in their lanes; they revel in signal and contour, replace questions with better questions. Variably flat and fortissimo, panoramic and specific, Kelly’s poems dramatize “bonfire continuity error” and “assonant alien astro-liberations,” asking us to "register again what has been registered slightly."

Allow Me performs recombinatory and deductive sleights of hand wherein software instructions, punchlines, academic jargon, and quotidian speech can try on one another's costumes. In the vaudevillian tradition of an abracadabra-ist, this book comes fully Verfremdungs bedecked.

Allow Me is a deliriously madcap tumult of high-octane language whose sense apparatus knows no bounds. Proceeding from an absent center, these roving poems joyride in search of what hides in one’s unconscious, while posing the loaded question: “what am I being invited not to see?” Filtered through philosophy, advertisement lingo, and improvisational comedy, Christine Kelly makes an ontological inquiry into our mediated reality of social coding, flickering screens, and very material earth. Allow Me deploys the frisson of cognitive pleasure in this bravura collection of poems. The results are electrifying. —Brenda Iijima