Survivor's Guilt

Author: Anthony Rodriguez

Publisher: Vegetarian Alcoholic Press (2022)

"The narrator of Survivor’s Guilt—wry, inviting, raw—inhabits you immediately, as though telling you your own story, mid-conversation. This perspective beckons you as though from inside the text, with such unabashed humanity you have no choice but to keep reading, and laughing. Anthony Rodriguez’s Survivor’s Guilt conquers catastrophe by asking you, the reader, at the book’s yearning end—what’s next?"

–August Evans

"When the paths before you are chosen, taken, willed upon you; when the you on the street becomes the you in the house, sometimes it is not clear who, what thing, or what you got you there. It’s quite the existential problem. In Anthony Rodriguez’ new collection, Survivor’s Guilt, all those possible players are constantly humming to solve it through a choose-your-own-adventure-orchestra, a radio that 'tunes into last summer and next summer.' Rodriguez is at once an Oulipean experimenter, mathematically creating musical, narrative, and imagistic algorithms, a Tranströmer-esque harbinger of animated objects— '…the houses running the house with wire and wheels and labor'—a surrealist of the 21st century into all of this now! In this book of poems and their changing counterparts, through the living and the tuning, 'you find you most of all.'”

–Noah Burton