In the days after Zach Peckham’s As If And (New Mundo, 2026) first virused its way into my linguistic processing centers, my ear became jangly, skippy. Words skittered into adjacent words, clinked into wry rhyme. Language softpedalled representation, abdicated logical propositions, and reinvented itself, as one poem puts it, as “A / Tower of mirrors / Deflecting radar” (8)– a heap of flash and surface that becomes load bearing, that scrambles surveillance. The book’s title should have been a clue: three distinct conjunctions and / or logical operators, rear ending each other.

 Trying to make sense of what’d been done to me by Peckham’s stacks of prefixes and infixes, by his spidery, laddery dimeter poems all ajudder with hyphenation and perpetual arrest, I reflected that Peckham’s poetics of permutation (which land between Objectivist and Postmodern) felt like a distinct riposte to the more familiar principle, variation. Variation, in its influential modernist guise, (see, blackbirds), while recognizing that things can’t essentially be known by any one appearance, still holds out the core hope that by cataloguing more of these appearances, something close to the thing itself might be arrived at. The psychological basis of the variation is a Protestant dialectics of doubt, the vindictive desire to know, and a recognition of the limits of senses.

The permutation, by contrast, especially in Peckham’s adroit deployment of it, is extracted from the mainframe punchcard by punchcard with a certain abiotic glory. In American prose, Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis reimagined the machina not as a rupture in plot, but as its guiding principle; Oedipa Maas looks down on LA spread out cybernetically below like a radio transistor. But it took longer for the aesthetic challenge of the computer age to penetrate poetry, despite fitful starts; Josephine Miles’s pioneering computational poems, for instance, remain underknown, and who remembers flarf? More recently however, major books by Lillian Yvonne Bertram and others have recognized in the computer program and the algorithm a new, a priori condition of knowledge. For these poets, this new architecture of how we experience ourselves and others, requires a glitchier, branchier, more beveled poetics that both reflects and intervenes in such a modernity. Peckham, for instance, invokes Microsoft Excel’s “Values into cells” as a model for poetry (63), and the book is studded with empty matrices (“[  ] : [  ] : [  ]” [60]) waiting for Elijah.

It’s hard to capture in a short take the wandering spiritual experiencing that Peckham’s long, thin playroom poems enact, defined by the tension between overexposed linguistic surfaces and a shadowed subject behind them: “Ubuntu / hedge // Commodore / 64 in twilight // dredge” (78). Which is why the shorter, somewhat peevish “Leech Screed+”, a lull between larger earnestnesses, offered me a nice resting place (83). These are the first three couplets:

dumbfounded

into dumbness

fully dumb

+dumped

of speech

numb in the lungs (l. 1-6)

This then is a breakup-induced crisis of fluency, in the tradition of Stevens’s “Man on the Dump.” Rhyme is so mechanical and insistent that it becomes a cycling through of all possible permutations, instead of a vehicle for associative leap, so that our ear becomes tin, and our sense of possibility stagnates. Still, at its nadir, this mechanical exercise still serves as an engine. It allows the poem to trade exploration of the depth value, subjectivity (presently scarred, depressive), for a tracing of the neutral, horizontal linkages of the linguistic field.

Which brings me to the +. A moment later, we get:

non sequitur sung
out un

+in

+on

to each (l. 8-12)

One name, then, for the muse that Peckham invokes to transcend (not transform) this poetic mode is “non sequitur”; this is an epic invocation to rhetoric itself (c.f. “Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name”). The other, here-unspoken name for this tutelary deity is Emily Dickinson, to whom Peckham owes the “+.” Dickinson uses the + in her drafts (we think) to signify an open possibility, a word perhaps not quite right, but not quite settled. In a poem set in a spiritual landscape of breakup finality, this invocation of makerly draftiness allows Peckham the beginning of a way out, as the permutations move from negation “un”, through the stases of “in” and “on,” until they find nascent movement outward with “to each.”

As the poem goes on, the eponymous “leech” emerges in fragments. We see a “creek of bile,” a “worm’s / arms unfurling,” a “thorax engorged,” until at the end we get “layers of leeches / suckling to a beat // this reach / this reelaround / this hoping / for a breach”. Such leeches flicker uneasily between the physical and the figurative, and in both cases Peckham seeks revaluation of the easy pejorative. If the leech is a parasite, it is also medicinal: its screw teeth, as they “breach” the skin, secrete a salutary blood thinner, and it is said to absorb toxins. Translated into figurative terms, leeching would signify the lysis that this book offers, which dissolves thickened poetic habits (proposition, exposition) to enable a freer, more energetic circulation. Peckham, here, figures himself not as Wordsworth the ecstatic translator, but as the leech-gatherer who stutters between speech, “dumbness”, and repetition; who “not all alive or dead” brings back from the borders a small, needful harvest. As Peckham writes in “End Sync”: “my very small life / is a smudge on something / passing without sound” (86).







Works Cited

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Peckham, Zach. As If And. New York: New Mundo Press, 2026. 83, 86.