How to Arrange a Poetry Collection Using Mix Tape Rules - Electric Literature

Nearly a hundred pages arranged in 22 stacks of varying thickness reached from one wall of my apartment to the other. Lorde's "Hard Feelings / Loveless" played from the bluetooth speaker on my bookshelf. I tried to pinch back tears-mostly of frustration and doubt-and failed.

It was late 2019, and I was finishing up edits on my debut poetry collection, due out from Big Lucks Books the following summer. I had the content: thirty-some poems in varying conditions, some complete or near-final drafts, others mere placeholder pages. I had a subject: love, including the desire, conflict, heartbreak, bitterness, and spectacle that accompany it. I had a name: That Ex, the charged eponym of the book's speaker. But the manuscript held shape in only two dimensions: length, mass. It didn't exist in that third dimension that makes a manuscript a book: It had no arc, that yearning of meaning against the gravity of language itself.