My dear friend called me on the phone today and for some reason, I can’t recall, I ended up reciting him Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.” The poem is simple, easy, direct, idiot-proof. So much of poetry is routinely killed, like any pleasure, by the need to impose it as important and meaningful (secretly, exclusively, of course) onto people who are young and hungry for magic. But often all the joy gets combed out in school when you want to just fiddle and noodle around with words. Then again, plenty of things get combed out in school or youth.1

So Wordsworth:

The poem seems exactly what the Lake Poet called for: direct, observational language, written in an unpretentious folk idiom. That is, lyrical ballads.

But the poem is odd! Let’s go line by line.

1. How can someone dwell among untrodden ways? Once you dwell among them, even if it’s only you, you trod, you make way. It’s like owning property on public land. Or reading a book no one has ever read before.

2. “Beside the springs of Dove” refers to the River Dove. I can’t tell how tricky or sly this line is, intentionally. Though “Dove” of course conjures doves, just as “springs” conjures Spring. It’s a nice doubleness of emotional background music. The line’s flatly literal, geographic.

3. “A Maid whom there were none to praise”: but this poem will praise her.

4. “And very few to love”: It’s interesting because you’d expect, maybe, few to praise and none to love, since love is the bigger ask. Or, if none to praise, none to love. But of course Wordsworth’s colloquial “very few” is a way of saying almost none. Though again, the speaker loves Lucy. Like, a lot.

5. “A violet by a mossy stone”: do violets grow by mossy stones? I’m sure. I don’t know. But the contrast is striking. There are three colors here almost automatically without being named: violet (purple), mossy (green), stone (gray). So yes, purple would stand out.

6. But as she stands out, how can she be “Half hidden from the eye!”?

7. And if half-hidden, though a stone covered by moss is hidden, the extending flower, especially if solitary, you’d think would be profoundly naked, revealed, blazing forth. Even so, how can it be “Fair as a star, when only one…”

8. “Is shining in the sky”: The poem keeps emphasizing how hidden and secret and unknown Lucy is. Yet its images do—and I think this is amazing, not a fault—the exact opposite. She’s contrasted, thrown into the imagination, and now a dominating solitary star of the heavens. Talk about a glow up.

9. “She lived unknown, and few could know”: If she lived unknown, how could any know?

10. “When Lucy ceased to be”: So how did the speaker learn she ceased to be? When was that?

11. “But she is in her grave, and, oh,”: how I love that little hiccuping “oh,” between commas.

12. “The difference to me!” The flattest, plainest, most emotionally heavy line in the poem. You can hear Frost warming up a century hence: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and “that has made all the difference.” Point to the difference. Monumentalize it. Just don’t say what it is. Some things lie too deep for tears, or words.

You enter, or seem to enter, the world of adult sexuality. Ideality, or perhaps repression, is harder to take seriously because you begin to learn up-close how violated and compromised the people around you are.

When I was in middle school, I learned something about a family member that marked me forever. The accidental discovery of gay pornography on the internet of the nineties, a world of Netscape and AOL chat rooms, XXX image galleries, among other things, showed me a version of myself, and what I responded to, that I had no way of reconciling with, let alone having ever predicted. Then someone I knew closely died in a motorcycle accident suddenly. Her name was Ashley.

My parents seemed to be understanding. But life went on. No matter what happened, things went on. My belief in a spiritual world, one accessed through church or prayer slowly vanished. All that seemed left was music and poetry. Well, and porn. Quite a lot of my childhood devotions were held onto too, born from the entertainment industry. But one day I didn’t want to collect action figures anymore. I forgot my toys.

I was no longer who I was.

By senior year of high school, I adopted an attitude that was fundamentally cynical, in a quietly brooding, wounded way, that I kept to myself, mostly. Wanting to be liked but a sensitive weirdo. But my grim would leak out.

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The Iliad names a place: Ilium. Troy. The Odyssey names an action: wandering. One poem is organized around a city under siege; the other around a man trying to find his way back to hearth and family. Take these two movements as possible metaphors for translation.

One temptation is to treat the original text like Troy itself: a fortified, precious site containing some absolute meaning we must charge at and recover at all costs. But translation offers no clean invasions. Every attempt to seize hold of the original smuggles something foreign across the threshold. And translators always carry hidden cargo: an era, an ideology, a preferred style, a theory of reading. Things they might not be aware of.

The opposite danger is wandering way off course. Translation can become so captivated by its own slant that Homer disappears. Helen becomes Victorian Helen, Gen Z Helen. The Cyclops becomes a virtuoso CGI effect or a lumbering phallus symbol. Odysseus’s own complicated desires here mirrors the translator’s own: they may claim fidelity, but, yeah, they’re along for the ride. They want to get lost in this or that bramble of passage and flourish. As they should.

Meanwhile, the goal remains ahead of us, waiting. We’re promised homecoming, supposedly, to Homer’s Greek. Yet the journey is what matters really, in this other place, here, so far away, called English. For readers who actually like poetry, who have an ear for it, it must.

So how resist conquest or drift?

The existing translations themselves stand before me like a kind of suitor, each one boasting their readiness to stand in for an absent king. Throughout my life I’ve reread and taught mainly the Fitzgerald and Fagles. Drawn to Fitzgerald’s comely grandeur and supreme gifts for phrasing. Yet pulled also by Fagles’s muscular looseness and knack for tactility.

While in Paris, after seeing Nolan’s new film adaptation (charmed but disappointed by it), I wanted to test out two new versions I’d never read. I swiftly found Anthony Verity’s translation in the Oxford World Classics series and Daniel Mendelsohn’s (available overseas in an oversized Penguin Classics edition).

Because I know Book I of The Iliad and Book XI of The Odyssey best, these are where I go to test the chops of a new voice in the roost. What I carry is not a memory of the Greek but of its many English rivals. Let’s start with a hyper-literalized version of the opening of Book XI, as the voyage toward the land of the dead begins:

But when we had gone down to the ship and the sea,
first of all we dragged the ship into the shining salt sea,
and in the black ship we set the mast and sails,
and, taking the sheep, we made them go aboard, and aboard ourselves
we went, grieving, shedding a flourishing tear.
And for us, behind the dark-blue-prowed ship,
she sent a following wind, filling the sail, a good companion,
Circe of the lovely hair, a formidable goddess endowed with human speech.
And we, having attended to each piece of equipment throughout the ship,
sat; and the wind and the helmsman kept her straight.
All that day her sails were stretched as she traversed the sea;
and the sun went down, and all the ways grew shadowed.

Now compare that with A. T. Murray’s 1919 prose rendering for the Loeb Classical Library:

But when we had come down to the ship and to the sea, first of all we drew the ship down to the bright sea, and set the mast and sail in the black ship, and took the sheep and put them aboard, and ourselves embarked, sorrowing, and shedding big tears. And in the wake of our dark-prowed ship a fair wind that filled the sail, a goodly comrade, was sent by fair-tressed Circe, dread goddess of human speech.

So when we had made fast all the tackling throughout the ship, we sat down, and the wind and the helmsman made straight her course. All the day long her sail was stretched as she sped over the sea; and the sun set and all the ways grew dark.

Here is Anthony Verity, from 2016:

When we had made our way back to the ship and the sea,
we first of all dragged it down to the bright salt water,
then stepped the mast and set the sail in the black ship.
We collected the sheep and drove them on board, and
embarked ourselves, troubled and shedding copious tears.
Lovely-haired Circe, the awesome goddess speaking with
a mortal voice, sent us a following breeze to fill our sail, a
good friend, which blew astern of our dark-prowed ship.
We secured the tackle all along the ship and sat still,
and the wind and the steersman held her on course.
All day long the sail was stretched taut as she sped over
the deeps; and the sun went down, and all the ways grew dark.

Lucid, clean, serviceable, and highly readable. But one begins to lose the sense of reading verse rather than prose. Lines end with “and,” “a,” and “still” for no apparent reason. And the verbs (—which, to borrow a formulation from Frank Wilderson III, reveal the politics and psyche of a writer—) feel denuded of something: stepped, collected, troubled, speaking, sent, secured. Some of these are inevitable and perfectly fine. But they do not place me inside Homer. The language could just as easily describe someone locking their car or double-checking a work laptop’s shutdown protocol list.

“Copious tears” is less cartoonish than Murray’s “big tears,” though hardly less external to grief. “Lovely-haired Circe” improves upon the dated “fair-tressed Circe,” but the differences in the final line are negligible. To be picky, I cannot imagine anyone in the throes of backbreaking grief crying what could adequately be called either “big” or “copious” tears.

Let’s use these same pressure points to test Mendelsohn:

After we’d gone back down to the ship by the shore of the sea
We began by dragging the ships into the gleaming salt sea,
And then we set up the mast and raised the sail of the black-hulled ship.
After bringing the sheep aboard, we went on board ourselves,
Lamenting all the while, the hot tears streaming down.
A favoring wind sprang up then, just aft of the dark-prowed ship,
Bellying out the sail to help us, a useful companion,
Sent by Circe of the beautiful braids, dread goddess who speaks like a human.
Once we had made fast every piece of tackle on board
We sat down. The wind and the steersman kept the ship on course.
The sails were stretched tight all day long as the ship traveled the sea.
The sun was sinking down as the sea-routes grew dark with shadows.

This is more alive in several places, more physical and more repetitive, and therefore truer to Homer. Yet I find the poetry lacking here too, somehow more noticeably because the translation is not prosaic in the least. It is cumbersome:

Lamenting all the while, the hot tears streaming down.

Mendelsohn adds temperature, but “hot tears streaming down” sounds wooden and stiff. He is an inch away from writing spurt.

Sent by Circe of the beautiful braids

has a wonderful, enchanting rhythm. Homer is nothing if not his epithets and taglines. But “beautiful braids” leaves me a little shruggy. “Beautiful” merely certifies the image instead of making us see or feel it.

I like the immediacy of:

A favoring wind sprang up then

as well as the embodiment of:

Bellying out the sail to help us.

The final line also sounds good, moving in one extended breath. But beyond its departures from the original, “sea-routes grew dark with shadows” sounds technical where I think the phrase demands something starker, more solemn. I think of Shakespeare’s tremendous line from Antony and Cleopatra:

The day is done, and we are for the dark.

One of the greatest lines in English poetry. Insert writerly detail of almost any kind, sidewalks, evening, shadows, and the densely compacted simplicity that gives the line its brute force begins to collapse.

Now Fagles:

Now down we came to the ship at the water’s edge,
we hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first,
stepped the mast in the black craft and set our sail
and loaded the sheep aboard, the ram and ewe,
then we ourselves embarked, streaming tears,
our hearts weighed down with anguish . . .
But Circe the awesome nymph with lovely braids
who speaks with human voice, sent us a hardy shipmate,
yes, a fresh following wind ruffling up in our wake,
bellying out our sail to drive our blue prow on as we,
securing the running gear from stem to stern, sat back
while the wind and helmsman kept her true on course.
The sail stretched taut as she cut the sea all day
and the sun sank and the roads of the world grew dark.

As poetry? Vastly superior. We still have “streaming tears,” but almost every image and phrase feels lived-in and lively. It sounds voiced, not dictated or translated. Someone is telling us what happened. The punching sounds of:

we hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first

are sonically rich and imaginatively cinematic. I see those choppy, glittering waves. The weakest passage is:

streaming tears,
our hearts weighed down with anguish . . .

It sounds like inherited epic-emotion filler rather than a grief observed.

Now Fitzgerald:

We bore down on the ship at the sea’s edge
and launched her on the salt immortal sea,
stepping our mast and spar in the black ship;
embarked the ram and ewe and went aboard
in tears, with bitter and sore dread upon us.
But now a breeze came up for us astern—
a canvas-bellying landbreeze, hale shipmate,
sent by the singing nymph with sun-bright hair;
so we made fast the braces, took our thwarts,
and let the wind and steersman work the shop
with full sail spread all day about our coursing,
till the sun dipped, and all the ways grew dark
upon the fathomless unresting sea.

As poetry? Majestic. But Fitzgerald’s instinct is always to jam the tiller and open the throttle. His version’s full of conspicuous additions and expansions: the sea made immortal, dread intensified, Circe transformed into a singing nymph with sun-bright hair, the nautical machinery sharpened, the closing sea rendered fathomless and unresting. Most of these choices work, sometimes magnificently. They are rhetorically beautiful and emotionally fitting. But they also make Fitzgerald’s in key places a full departure.

Again, not necessarily a complaint. Fitzgerald understands that literal equivalence alone won’t produce epic force in English, and he has Shakespeare and Milton charioting at his back, for sure.

Of course this leaves Emily Wilson, the most famous English translator of Homer in the twenty-first century, and reportedly an important source text for Nolan’s adaptation.

How will she compare?

We reached the sea and first of all we launched
the ship into the sparkling salty water,
set up the mast and sails, and brought the sheep
on board with us. We were still grieving, weeping,
in floods of tears. But beautiful, dread Circe,
the goddess who can speak in human tongues,
sent us a wind to fill our sails, fair wind
befriending us behind the dark blue prow.
We made our tackle shipshape, then sat down.
The wind and pilot guided straight our course.
The sun set. It was dark in all directions.

Wilson has been praised for making Homer plainspoken, direct, and accessible. Of all these versions, hers is certainly the most immediately speakable. The lines sound as though someone is talking to you rather than declaiming at you. They possess a remarkable smoothness and clarity of movement.

My principal problem is tone.

The passage begins the movement toward the dead, yet Wilson makes it sound too jaunty. Sparkling salty water has the brightness of a Pellegrino advertisement. Grief is noted and quickly dispatched, while the rest of the passage establishes no sustained pressure around it. Her compact nautical phrasing is economical and accurate, but some of it carries a modern pluck and bounce I can’t un-hear. The crew sounds cheerful, ready to salute the skipper. Anchors aweigh!

The wind and pilot guided straight our course.
The sun set. It was dark in all directions.

Her final lines render factual darkness but little foreboding. The ship is guided. The sun sets. Darkness is reported in every direction. The language smoothly moves, but is it set to cruise control?

To Wilson’s credit, she is more exact in several places than Fitzgerald or Fagles. Circe remains a goddess rather than becoming a nymph. The prow keeps its dark-blue coloring. The wind as companion is handled with clever economy.

And I’ll always prefer a contemporary translation willing to excavate Homer from the stale pomp that needs dusting off. Her version is new and, crucially, makes Homer sound renewed.

Yet where’s the mood of the passage? The slight anticipation of dead?

But rather than just critiquing from the backseat, allow me to take a stab at it:

But when we had gone down to the ship at the sea’s edge,
first we hauled the ship into the bright-salt sea,
and in the black hull we set our mast and spar,
putting aboard the sheep, we went aboard ourselves,
in tears we went, grieving and shedding tears anew.
Then from behind our blue-black prow, she ruffled up
a sail-swelling wind, a stout companion,
smooth-braided Circe sent, dread goddess with human tongue,
and we, having made our gear fast and trim,
we sat, while the wind and steersman steered her true.
All day her full sails spread as she crossed the vast sea
until the sun stooped down, and all the ways went dark.

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While in Paris for the month of July, I got myself to a debut screening of Nolan’s latest release in digital IMAX. I’m always interested in what this director is doing, but his last big blockbuster Oppenheimer left me disappointed. As a lover of Homer, I went in with high hopes yet wary not of how the poetry of cinema would be told, but the speech of ep…

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The cult of genius or celebrity in our consumer age is sold as a dream of pure productivity without labor. This is not only a cynical, not to mention quite profitable, Silicon Valley view of intelligence. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of artifice.

You know, that whole Art thing.

Because artifice is no more evil than art is. Though neither is innocent.

Many righteous critiques of AI, ones I otherwise align with, begin with an old rhetoric: artificial intelligence is debased because it is not authentic, not real, not true. That anxiety is ancient.

Plato worried that writing itself would usurp living thought, that written language was a copy of a copy, a dead transcript of a living exchange. To write words down, since for Plato words are already illegitimate, is to produce a bastard of a bastard. But that argument can only take us so far, because what it points back to is some ideal origin that never existed. As if meanings without the contamination of needing to communicate and translate them might be whole and clear forever.

Meanwhile, poetry is always already artificial. Writing is already mediated. We all speak in borrowed tongues. Down to our gestures and noises. And a poem can never be less artful because it was made, revised, scrapped, rejiggered. Though plenty of bad poems die on the operating table, sure.

The stronger argument against AI, in my opinion, focuses not on authenticity but on labor.

The troubling fantasy is not that machines can parrot human expression in a convincing, eerie manner. They can. It’s the idea that something of merit could ever be shaped and breathed into, given the staying power of happy accident and bright shimmering error, without any toil or sacrifice. That is, patient suffering.

This is same the ruthless capitalist logic across every domain: How do I get more with less?

The short answer is theft. Work and exploitation still happen, but they become hidden, collectively repressed. Poetry, on the other hand, is full of thefts and thievery too. But even its cunning concealment tends to reveal something. Poetry is on the side of the long uselessness of what it doesn’t quite know how to say or think or feel, said another way.

Now enter Lana Del Rey.

1. Lana’s lyrics are better than her “authentic” poems, and that’s key to my argument.

As a poet who cut their teeth on Modernist and postmodernist art, I know authenticity is not the raw material one starts with. It’s what’s arrived at, if it is arrived at at all. Great poems are born from a hoard of fragments, akin to a salvage operation, some assemblage of memory, imitation, appropriation, discipline, accident, and revision. Not first-thought-best-thought, but what Adrienne Rich meant by revision: literally to re-vision, to see it again.

In short, you learn your instrument.

Many artists I adore have been labeled fake, phony, mannered, artificial as hell. To me, that’s not necessarily an insult. I want to disambiguate two kinds of artifice: a sweaty, grubby kind, built out of revision and chronic failure, and another kind. One that operates seamlessly, tuned toward absolute correctness and competence—the false God of the Right Data.

The first still bears the marks of useless, pointless risk.

The second passes off what we already know without the spiritual virtues of stupidity and failure.

As a poet friend once said, “I like leaky art.”

Lana Del Rey’s sprawling, diaristic, “authentic” poems—the ones that sound like the Raw Poet Self speaking—are by far her weaker work. Her lyrics, worked over heavily, collaged, compressed, are the stronger, rightfully iconic poetry. This, not despite the overwhelming artifice of studio production. But, in some sense, because of it. It takes no credit away from her, nor is it meant to shun collaborators (often invisible in musical creations). Rather, compression is where her unique vision (and I’m never against Originality) gets forced into focus, adding all that her influences (Eliot, Plath, Nabokov, Ginsberg, Dylan) don’t have or couldn’t quite.

By 2026 she has been all but sanctified. Few living artists have a fanbase more devoted to every choice: album cover, song production, vocal texture. Yet once upon a time, after a somewhat rough SNL debut, she was widely derided as fake, a hack. Today she’d be called a hack or a plant. And yet now, still without a major Grammy win, she’s received something like canonization. I’m all for it.

During COVID I read two very cheap unauthorized biographies about her I purchased off Amazon. They weren’t all gossip. But I cheered to learn how many false starts she had to give birth to herself, as someone who had transitioned out of my assigned gender and pronouns, having already published two books with my dead name, and seeking pastures new.

Born Elizabeth Grant, she didn’t stumble immediately into being Lana Del Rey. Before arriving, not that we ever arrive, there was a string of other identities: Lizzy Grant, May Jailer, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen, the short-lived Lana Rey Del Mar.

Her debut as Lana Del Rey, Born to Die, is a defining pop album of its era. In 2010 there was Lana Del Ray A.K.A. Lizzy Grant (notice the variation in spelling). Before that, in 2008, Kill Kill. Supposedly leaked items like Sirens. Most of my queer highly obsessed friends who are diehard fans still swear by her unreleased material being her best work, foraging for it and pillaging it off SoundCloud.

What makes Lana quintessential to me, however, is just how much artifice served her continual self-creation. She is not a shapeshifter the way Dylan or Madonna have been. Nor as mercurial and abrupt as Gaga. She’s more akin to David Lynch: an artist who found a voice through deliberate accumulations of collage, imitation, obsession, and a signature atmospherics until the source material fused into something wonderfully new and old, familiar yet unfamiliar.

“Arcadia” is not great because it reveals the authentic some Lana buried beneath the brand persona. It’s a great song with teeth as well as melancholy because the persona becomes utterly crystallized.

2. “Arcadia” looks simple on the page and is not: it tells the dream of being used.

One of her finest lyrics, qua lyric, to my hyper-critical ears and eyes is “Arcadia.” On the page it seems strikingly straightforward, even careless in its imagery.

My body is a map of L.A.
I stand straight like an angel with a halo
Hangin’ out the Hilton Hotel window
Screamin’, “Hey, baby, let’s go”

I can imagine someone scoffing: “Hey, baby, let’s go”?! That’s poetry?! You gotta be kidding me.

I once watched Robert Pinsky stand proudly contemptuous, during a Q&A, of the idea that Bob Dylan could be deemed a poet. He cited “Look out, kid!” as self-evident badness. The lines come from “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” which famously opens D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back with Allen Ginsberg famously in the background of the shot.

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I’m starting a free new online lecture series called Lectures in Poetry Seminar, or LIPS, and for our second meeting we’ll study Lana Del Rey’s “Arcadia,” one of her song lyrics that I find deeply entrancing, beautifully strange, and far from simple.

The lecture will be a close, line-by-line reading of the song as a poem.

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Welcome to Lectures in Poetry Seminar (LIPS), a new series of talks on poems I can’t stop thinking about.

Each seminar takes a single poem and reads it as closely as possible through four interconnected lenses: (1) my own personal experience, (2) craft and form, (3) questions of history, politics, and ethics as well as (4) spirituality and the X factor attending on all art.

My hope is not to explain poems away, but to stay with their complexity long enough for something surprising to emerge.

These lectures are meant for anyone who loves poetry, whether you’re a lifelong reader, a student, a writer, or simply curious about how a poem works and why it continues to matter.

Join me on Substack Live tonight, June 14th, at 8 PM EST.

Here are some of my insights in outline form about Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.”

For context: the poem was drafted and revised between October 23 and October 29, 1962, around Plath’s thirtieth birthday on October 27. This was an extraordinarily fertile period in her writing and marks the emergence of the late style that would make up the bulk of Ariel, first published posthumously in an edition arranged by Ted Hughes. The poems have since appeared in Ariel: The Restored Edition, edited by Frieda Hughes, which includes facsimiles of Plath’s typescript drafts. The most textually comprehensive edition, The Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, includes a manuscript facsimile of her handwritten draft of “Lady Lazarus.”

1. “Lady Lazarus” is fundamentally undecidable. Is this a myth of destruction or creation?

Though I have reread and studied the poem carefully, as well as many critical commentaries on it, I am unable to claim whether the poem is really about suicide, self-harm, survival, or art-making. The opening line announces, “I have done it again,” and the immediate interpretative problem never resolves. Is “it” suicide, survival, resurrection through art-making?

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A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At h…

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I’m starting a free new online lecture series I’m calling Lectures in Poetry Seminar (LIPS) and the first poem we’ll study with a close, line by line, reading is Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” my contender for her greatest lyric accomplishment among many others.

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What interest me below in these sonnets are how they take a weird stance towards the sonnet tradition, either in terms of voice, form, content or audience. In Shakespeare, we have an overthrow of the Petrarchan piety that a sonnet is meant to be a poem of praise for the beloved. He renews the form through contradicting it (only to reinforce the idea tha…

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My suitcase is still in the trash bag
I put it in a year ago
when I came back from a trip
where someone thought
they got bed bugs.
I haven’t opened the bag since
except to go to Paris
but then I was worried again
so I put the suitcase back
in the trash bag and it’s been there
the last ten months which is about
the time I’ve been
dating my new boyfriend.
I …

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My new crush is not a sexual thing. Unless I am saying that because I am being bi-phobic. I’m going to call her Sasha. Not that she’ll ever see this. She’s what I call a depression influencer. Plenty of people are performative about their mental health, or lack of it. But her stink has the ring of truth. She shit-posts, not shit talks. She recently completed a month of semi-gross-out selfies on her stories. Each one, if not totally rancid, was close to it. And it’s very clear that she’s doing all this intentionally.

I’m in love.

It might seem something far worse than mere cringe to feast on the spectacle of someone’s collapse. But I think with Sasha, again, who I’m crediting with crystallizing the emergent aesthetics of depression influencer behavior, in the year of our lord, 2026, it’s all intentional. And I want to be clear, she doesn’t go for the cheap seats which I’ve resorted to myself for pity likes whenever necessary: tribute posts to dying family members, hashtags about world tragedies, detailed accounts of an abusive employer or various tirades concerning dickless, toothless men. Though come to think of it, she does allude to the latter. I can tell she has a roster of Jacobs and Trevors hovering right behind her.

Sasha’s moroseness is more classical, philosophical even. Lately, probably a sign of my own depression, I’ve allowed myself to bed rot for hours in the morning and late evening scrolling and scrolling through reels of faces I will never meet and mostly do not want to know.

Then Sasha appeared.

We have friends in common. She looks 45, or thereabouts. I mean I would bet on that. But she could be 25. I don’t know. Like really. I’m so convinced at her projection of psychical unwellness nothing would surprise me now. She’s Gen Z. Maybe she’s Gen X. Who knows.

It started with a series of screenshot text messages she posted about someone she once dated years ago. There was a brief editorial about how she wasted at least a year of existence post-breakup imagining this Connecticut Fuck Goblin leading some far better or far worse life than in fact what was happening. Relatable, sure.

But what really caught my soul was a rant that she posted from her Notes. She frequently collects her disturbing dreams. In the one I think got me started on Sasha the Depression Influencer, she describes being restlessly awake in her bed (very meta for a dream), then reaching into her mouth with her left hand, forcing it down, as she did during her late teenage college days as a professional bulimic would-be sorority sister, and just cramming her pudgy fist deep, deep into her throat. But in the dream the hand squishes through various cavities of her head until she is able to pluck out a random tooth (not hers) that has become lodged in her brain since childbirth and clearly the cause of her ensuing life-depression.

Yes, Internet, I do want this kind of content. Maybe it’s very gay and ethically questionable of me to join the ranks of non-women who enjoy the dramatic sufferings of socialized women: from, I don’t know, Sylvia Plath’s domestic terrorisms to Lana Del Rey’s exquisite frolicking in Southern Gothic snowfall, sticking her head in and out of the stove with her new hubby. I want in on their fantasies. Even as the entrances are all exits.

Sasha feels different. Depressions have flavors, I swear. Some feel more granular and abnormal, like a failed cocktail. My bestie refers to this sometimes as Chemical Head. You feel like someone poured the wrong type of gasoline down your brain-socket. You are not meant to guzzle pure crude. Or sometimes my own brain betrays me because I feel like a minor electrical storm in the back alley of a 7-Eleven in Nevada. Sasha herself however does not go in for metaphors. I love brazen, emboldened metaphors, that are decadent, and unreliable, like the sinking cake in Sleeping Beauty. My whole life I have felt—sometimes—asleep—but like the prince in the red robe, not the Princess. I am waiting for my Princess to wake me. My friend SB likes to tease me (and her) about our shared weakness for BPD Princesses. Is that ableist, even though we are both neurodivergent, mentally ill people? Maybe. I don’t know.

But getting back to Sasha. No cutesy poet shit. Just the visceral. Sometimes her posts have the grotesque of like mood-boarding care of the film Seven. Not that she goes in for gore, exactly. But I appreciate how she auto-documents her enervated, lifeless eyes; the way she poses in a bathtub with all her clothes on, without the water running; the fact that she likes to ostentatiously display her pudge: love handles, finger-fat, back-fat, chin-fat, heavy cheeks, lumpy fingers, weird breast shapes in various blouses that are designed to make her seem completely liberated from Male Gaze, Incorporated. Not that that has been entirely successful.

It turns out there are plenty of straight men, lowkey everywhere, who enjoy Sasha the Depression Influencer’s demonstrations and digressions. She reminds me of certain LA comedians who have sizable social media followings precisely because they have fully embraced their body shapes not being conventionally beautiful, attractive, toxically white, symmetrical, whatever. That said, I think even if Sasha the Depression Influencer was Sydney Sweeney’s doppelgänger, she’d behave the exact same way.

As I was saying: depression has flavors. I got sidetracked.

Aside from Chemical Head (a kind of defective product feeling, very take your complaint up with the corporate office), there’s the standard model of depression. Suicidal Trauma Loop Replay. Which I believe is really our infernal entrapment in the past. The fact that our psychic clock got stuck or shattered and is still somewhere without us, running on some hamster wheel, forever locked, inside a foggy nether-region or blocked territory. Say, for example the Blizzard of 1996 when my brother was hospitalized for his delusions, or fast forward to 2001 when my fake-aunt had the misfortune of dropping dead of a heart attack a day or two before (was it after?) 9/11. So the event of her sudden demise was subsumed in other business, even for us, who knew her so closely. Her name was Annie.

There is the sacred suffering that’s like depression for those who are persecuted and oppressed unfairly. I think most gender minorities, straight or not, fit into this category more than only somewhat. It’s not that Sasha is or is not a feminist. I would argue she of course is. Especially with the compulsive foregrounding of her body as contagion and confrontation, as enjoyable revulsion. But her performances resist any type of familiar heroism, self-congratulations, pride in resistance.

She stares into the camera from her car and you swear, her eyes are catatonic, lifeless, dry, flatlined. I find it RIVETING.

My life is a little shit lately. I can’t complain. I don’t have her joy in decay, however. Her braveness. To flaunt one’s ugly. To make public one’s I-have-nothing-go-on, her “Oh look, you want to see something? How about nothing. I have nothing. I am nothing.” It’s like an updated medievalism for the Age of Looksmaxxing voids. We are all normalized now to be creepily voyeurs. Exhibitionists. Sad sacks. There’s no escape. We don’t want one.

The thirst trap economy is based on actually seducing strangers to want to become your sexual partners solely because they find your vanity (status)—which by its very nature excludes any kind of real authentic relationality—appealing. Imagine wanting to be picked by a barbed-wire fence? Well, that does sound a little dumb and hot. Transgressive, sure. But there’s no fence behind most of these gym rat, twink model boys, and I’m thinking primarily of the ones I am most attracted to yet am entirely uninterested in. I’m not one to talk.

Sasha the Depression Influencer has convinced me, while I study the exaggerated lines of her face, the curated slop mess of her apartment, the many vomit-colored beige rugs she owns in every room (there are not that many rooms yet they somehow feel different each time)—who needs sex. Who needs a partner. Who needs an ex. Who needs touch.

It turns out screen culture is profoundly asexual. Perhaps I should say de-sexual. Sasha is the desexualized goddess of our time and for our time. She will pose in a way to flex her shoulders, somehow neatly sculpted. While she looks drugged out on Zyprexa. She will press her boobs (not something I am prone to fetish in any way whatsoever, mind you) in recognizable ways that scream: sex, fuck me, I’m an object, I’m a toilet plunger, I’m a sneaker to piss in, etc. But then she drains her self-image of its necessary emptiness.

She is never vapid. Not even in her post-ironic pretense of vapidity. Or the opposite. Sasha is just Sasha. Clearly depressed and fully on view. Yum. I also have no idea. Behind the camera maybe she has an army of successful, buxom, bright-eyed friends, and they spend elaborate weekends at clubs all over the city. I doubt it. But the internet’s an illusion.

She posted one text-rant recently. About how exes aren't supposed to go away. They're horcruxes. Emotional debris lodged somewhere between your lungs and large intestines. (I really enjoyed that “somewhere.”) How the correct response is never healing culture. Destroy healing culture. Evil. Rather, her stance is study. Self-fascination.

To become a faraway stalker. To bathe in the glow of their digital waste. I bristled, wide-eyed, reading this. I could care less about the writing. The art. It’s her content I find refreshing. We are all, in fact, very sick. So she’s conducting the orchestra.

Fatness is still so hated. It’s not the world’s ultimate oppression. But it’s interesting how it’s safely there in both gay and straight worlds. It’s anti-woman, it’s anti-Black. Sasha uses it, like a weapon but also safety blanket. She describes it as repellant, sometimes a mask, sometimes a cudgel. I find that hot. But I don’t mean sexually hot. Unless I do?

Sasha may not even be considered thicker-bodied or “fat” (her word) to some. Her body might be read as only pudgy, a little lopsided, or whatever. I don’t know. There’s a whole neurotic pseudo-science to the world of skinny-fat, its meticulous tiers, credited and discredited labels. I am not a body positivity expert nor any trusted source. But I trust Sasha’s hatred of being objectified, her willingness to be objectified. I suspect she’s great in bed. Not because I think she necessarily “performs” sex well, or would want to. But there must be something thrilling to anyone whose consciousness is clearly so painfully there.

Like the exposed tacks in certain wall-to-wall carpet.

I grew up in the suburban homes of New Jersey in the 1990s.

Sasha does not own a pet. Sasha sometimes seems posed in proximity to parents or relatives that I assume live in the same city. She is not very interested in posting about them or strangers. She posts her writings which are musings. Both smarter and less polished than a “professional” writer’s amateur clickbait.

I worry about some of her politics, which I can only project, half-imagine. I just know this: her hollowed sadness; her deadened gaze; her messy bed. Her books and clothes strewn about a table; on the floor of a new-condo bathroom; some tchotchke objet in the backseat of a smallish car.

She must have money from somewhere. She must have some kind of job. She is not happy. But she does not brandish any victim narrative of the dejected. She only has this vital, angering force, centered around, I don’t know, life is shit, I’m over it, this is all there is, it’s not enough, don’t bother me, wake me when it’s over.

Who fucking knew it. Depression influencers are now a thing. I’m so into it.

Does that make me sick?

Mama, I want to be ugly.

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