A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit
Bateau Press, 2023

Winner of the BOOM Chapbook Contest

“the last dream I was / awake for I wore what / sleep keeps from me” is how the first poem in Dave Brennan’s edifying chapbook A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit ends and the rest of the volume holds to that ethereal premise. Namechecking Pauline Oliveros, James Blake and Edmund Jabés, among others, the work in A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit revels in atmospheric idiosyncrasy, with the prose-particle-poem being Brennan’s primary mode of enlightenment. A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit is a chapbook that this reader wishes were a full-length collection—the book ends too soon and my only recourse was to start it all over again.

—Jeff Alessandrelli, author of Fur Not Light

A synesthesia’d bundle of senses. Sound the great dictator. Dave Brennan plops us in a room and makes us feel it. A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit is an ambient song made textual and a rejection of its own translation. Brennan leans into the uncertainty of space—of silence, of time—and refuses to make sense of it. Instead, he gives a blueprint for feeling it, living it. We hang in that indefinable click between silence and sound (“The vibration traveled within. I can’t pin it down. I lay no claim to the devotion felt. Ungovernable, irreducible”). Between what we record and what we leave behind. Between presence and absence. Between genres. As visual as it is sonic, its form spreads itself out, unsure if it’s tugging us deeper into the page or back out into the world. A truly hybrid work, it’s as much a consideration of ecocriticism as it is aestheticism, and expertly merges the two to make sense of the self and its impulse to make itself permanent (“my sight, my paper pupil, skins me with the hot ash of what I haven’t penned”). A Dash as Long as the Earth’s Orbit reverberates and reverberates and reverberates.

—Olivia Muenz, author of I Feel Fine

Disintegration F_ace
Schism Press, 2023

Read as an open-access pdf at Schism
Buy the paperback

“Dave Brennan’s Disintegration F_ace feeds Cindy Sherman’s hyperreal photographs through ChatGPT and splices the emitted txt files into a contagion. Under the eye of social media, Brennan’s manifesto on semiotics-cum-outsider-art-project offers tools for divination / dissemination that infects its users like a twitter newsfeed. Inside this text, the human face as a sign representing an individual is corrupted into a self-replicating virus that feeds off the husk of the original. Both reader and writer are tested, forced to confront a banal hyperreality where neither entity may matter.”

—M. Forajter, author of Interrogating the Eye

"Examinations of the face are often reduced to an aesthetic assessment—what is beautiful, what is compelling, what creates a visualized context around itself. The scene measured through descriptions of this localized landscape. But rarely is it the signifier that faces scrutiny. What is a face? As it's spelled out on the page, when its ties to the signified have begun to strain, when the image degrades into whatever scaffolding lies beneath? Dave Brennan has found the tactile mobilities of this language, every semantic and syntactic method of its locomotion. The cacographic scrawl / monolithic ink stain. In metamorphosizing the face into text, there is nowhere left to hide. In this regard, Disintegration F_ace reveals itself as a work of unflinching investigative poetics."

—Mike Corrao, author of Gut Text and Under Reef

“IN MY MIRROR IS A GUN BUT IT IS ALSO A FLOPPY DISK AND MY AOL USERNAME. I AM VERY EXCITED TO EXIST AS THIS DEEPFAKE OF CINDY SHERMAN’S DOLL EYES REPOSTED AS DECOMPOSING JPEG; RETWEET THIS PIXEL TO SUPPORT LOCAL ARTISTS. SMOKE SIGNIFIES FIRE. FIRE MAKES SMOKE. I HAVE ALIENS ON FILM AND I CAN PROVE IT. I HAVE THE WORLD’S LONGEST RUNNING SIMS GAME PLAYING ON MY COMPUTER. MUZZLE IS TRENDING AND SO IS SIMULATION. I AM TIRED OF WRITING, SO TIRED OF THINKING, TIRED OF PAYING MY RENT, TIRED OF DRINKING LATTES, TIRED OF HAVING HUMAN HANDS. I HAVE A LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION TO CHATGPT. I GOT MARRIED IN THE METAVERSE. I’M SO HAPPY TO BE DISINTEGRATED LIKE THIS; STRIPPED DOWN TO MY MOST ESSENTIAL: MY YOUTUBE FALLOUT APOLOGY VIDEO WILL BE A HIT. I REREAD MY DIARY, I REREAD MY DIARY I REREAD MY DIARY. I’M PUMMELING YOU WITH THE MIRROR AND THE GUN IS A NAME.”

—M. Forajter, author of Interrogating the Eye