Fleeting associations, bits dispersing in the wind, continue on towards the end. "Toss me the ball. Take me to the game. Send me on home. Call me safe," (62) is the ultimate line of Olivia Muenz's debut poetry book and winner of the 2022 Gatewood Prize judged by Julie Carr, I Feel Fine. The ball and the game aren't just parochial deferments, but a necessity to feel at home, to be safe, to be out of he elements within a performative architectural landscape where everything is consumable, returnable, and retractable. Yet these statements do not plead. They are structural, building an alternative language, a possible new perception.
      This book's title is deceptive. Unless of course one reads closely, unless of course, one looks at the idea of fine as fine, as in, "I'm fine," as in, there isn't more to say, there isn't more to concur, not much else to add, except there is so much more. The delusive etiquette of being: "I'm fine." As in, just ok, as in "treading through." As in, does anyone really feel fine? As in, an emphasis on fine as if speaking to one's distant cousin or a roommate's friend. As in, "fine" is superficially deceptive, as in prescriptive. Just fine. Can't and shouldn't speak more. As in, there is no space, no place for the realities of the situation, but simply short instances, and gestures pretending to care without emotional overload. Short and sweet—when language and cultural milieu has turned everything into a quick platitude to wash off at the next stop. To say one feels fine does not exemplify anything besides the mere fact that there is more, and no, this conversation is not going to be had, as in, it isn't socially appropriate, as in, the emotional labor of it all.

Bits. These bits.

      Muenz's speaker is far from trying to appease, but is rather questioning the ableist, homogenous expectations put upon each body as if a game for the market. The speaker is consistently addressing a "you." The "you" is not the reader; I'm not being addressed. The "you" is not a lover; this isn't an epistolary. Muenz writes: "Here is that memory I wasn't looking for. You brought it back all of a sudden in a little tote bag. I had forgotten all about it and now here it is. What a surprise. Did you bring a gift receipt" (8). This "you" is at once the advertisement executive, doctor, ulterior motive, the ecologically conscious consumer, and everyone and everything who has decided upon serious inquiries, calculations, and arbitrary requirements, now being broken down into simple and exact terms. The "you" is an expectation, a normative power each body is struggling with, is holding, whether decisively or not, whether desiring or not. There is a goodness being elided, or rather questioned in the sales and returns of memories, in the marketable identity. "Or our money back. How considerate. How thoughtful" (39). Language takes a new turn, operating against the market while simultaneously utilizing the marketable uniformity of widely acknowledged, reproduced declarations. "But only my temple. Is tender I am tough. Luck baby. I am down for the count. I am rained. Out" (25). These tiny, beautiful and coveted cliches. Fragments as slices, bromides as fractures, as though language is truncated. Language is truncated. Language has been broken down for some time now. By production, turning communication itself into a commodity.

"How nice." "How nice" (5).

Little niceties pepper the pages, the ought-tos, the supposed-tos, the proprieties of being. A division of words, a division of understanding. One term leading to another. We feel fine. We are the proprieties of labor and virtue. We are a proper and productive person in society. We are bits and pieces. "How orderly" (5).
      The form of the book itself is breaking down order. There is a sparseness to the language. A thickening fragmentation to Muenz's prose poetry; at times both disjointed and connective. She writes: "But I never run out of bits. Do you like my routine" (24).
      What are these bits? Are they not only bits of things, pieces of wholes, little crumbles to represent a bigger picture yet, these bits, little pieces, "Little Secret[s]," (58) cover the floor, the speaker's trajectory, a train of bread crumbs, a line of return. These bits, bits and pieces, are pieces of past, present, and future, as though flakes and flecks of dust leading us, the speaker, the reader, and the author, to the next enactment, a place of seeing the world as whole, as "a big safety net. For all of us," instead of in fragments and news flashes. This prose, bits of language, is crocheting a wholeness, a place where each body gets to exist, to be. "Won't you take a walk with me. Won't you carry the umbrella for just a little while"(36). In the bits, a load is redistributed, an aid emerges. Not only is the reference to a bit a humorous irony indicating a little standup comedy and a lot of performance before an anticipatory audience, within this routine and double meaning there is an element of searching, covering, and comparing, a seeing in a three-dimensionality. A quatri-dimensionality, even.
     "Do you like my routine" does not end in a question mark, omitting and deriding order. Statements become hypothetical; reality is unreality. Language stops engaging in its original form, the intended form, the boxed form. Punctuation and language lacks routine, or rather, regular routine. It has a routine. Language continues, it is crumbling, it is letting pieces go. Punctuation marks fall to the side. The punctuation marks one has been trained to read and write no longer function. This isn't a question—it's an investment, it's an inveigh. It's anti-investment, it's the opposite of investment, it is anti-routine, anti-work, it is. A bit. Of the falling, reconstructed language working against the function of working, working against the function of labor. These bits, these routines, no longer have a function other than to be.
      This isn't a question.
      I Feel Fine refuses to conform to a leftist marketability of care in a moment when conformity is elusively desirable, dividing and upholding the good from the bad. There are no binaries in this text; instead, what is found are the matted insides of seemingly digestible binaries, the complexities of existing in a neoliberal market. Muenz invokes a wholeness, a coming-together: "Let's get physical. The globe has broken. Into a million little pieces. Somebody get a broom" (59). I imagine an ornamental glass globe falling off a Christmas tree, scattering into pieces and shards, only to be swept up into a pile. Not into its produced, preconception of form, but into a new imperfection of togetherness.