The Others

The Others unfolds in layers of both complexity of content and technique, beginning in a seemingly simple, straightforward way, developing deeper ideas behind the scenes. . . . Thankfully, Rohrer's skillful storytelling never leaves the reader behind, no matter how far off course from the morning commute his protagonist travels.
Andrew Miller, Yes Poetry

Tumbling from one speaker to the next, Matthew Rohrer’s dreamlike novel-in-verse harkens back to a time when poetic language was used, principally, to tell stories. It is experimental and strange but not in a way that alienates its readers. Whether Rohrer’s characters are riding the F train in midtown Manhattan, high in nineteenth-century France, or fending off robot bigfeet, his masterful attention to detail and rhythm absorbs and engages. Each narrative emerges from the one that precedes it, like a Russian nesting doll, producing a sensation of spacious expansion and laying bare the manner by which narratives absorb and give birth to each other. This is a book of trapdoors and weird trips and special delights.
—The Believer, Believer Book Award Notification

Wonderfully ambitious and fully realized, Rohrer's The Others engages similar questions of readerly participation and, more specifically, the cultivation of a shared consciousness through art. In the book's sprawling fictive terrain, the constant presence of the other within the self—that eternal alterity—is a shadow story that haunts the narrative proper. As the work unfolds, it is this secret, hidden most of all from the speaker of the poem, that is gradually revealed, understood, and dramatized beautifully in the style of the writing itself.
—Kristina Marie Darling, Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading this book is like opening a door to a room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then opening a door within that room to another room and then—you get the point. It’s also: funny, mind-altering, occasionally spooky, and a conceptually brilliant reminder that our lives are filled with stories every single day. 
—Allie Wuest, Catapult

You should read The Others. It'll do things to you.
John Maher, Publishers Weekly, staff pick