Vertigo of shrinking, like Alice, in the face of the reduction undergone in the face of a review, good or bad. Suddenly confined to a specific array of tropes, tendencies, swerves of character. I gasp for air and try to remember that I am not the book, not even the unwritten book. We must dwell in potential or die. At the same time I am responsible for what I've written, though not for how it's read. I am as it were legally responsible: ego scriptor. But to go on, to become new, to write anew, I claim the scandalous privilege of unaccountability: whether ill or skilled at these numbers, they don't add up to a whole. Hoping the conversation is just beginning. Hoping in the poem.