Goes on now except) by Ryan Skrabalak [PREORDER]

Paperback, 2026

Goes on now except), Ryan Skrabalak’s second book, is a schematic of grief for and in the machinery of thinking. The ways that memory and grief saturate, colorize, fabricate, elide–their malleability, their structuring force. And the ways memory goes on, carried across these poems by Skrabalak’s driftless, stochastic treble clef of flow states and Interstates, of mountains, motels, and Dollar Generals, and by his sharp bass line of dissent against the nation-state’s “ruined moon,” its “megacorpse.”

Locked on to the “microexpanding noise” within the lyric (or vice versa), and to the ambient and intimate frequencies of its own “textured light,” Goes on now except) asks: is a book a score, a house, a microfiche? And: “was that daylight a map for being real?”

Versions of these poems in Cleveland Review of Books and Black Sun Lit.

A playlist to accompany the book, also available as a CD; check the "with CD" option at purchase (CD-R with foil stamped Kraft case, edition of 50).

Praise for Goes on now except):

"Music, like fog or logic, determines its forms, its arrangements, and makes its renderings known. How to describe this milky latticed state of feeling as a kind of walk through air? In the musical offering that is Goes on now except), Ryan Skrabalak loosens a landscape (walk now) of our senses (bend water now) and a vibrato in the visual sphere. A beautiful algorithmic motherfucker. A book of echoed lace, employment, and oral sex."
–Tan Lin

“In Goes on now except), nature, sex, music, and perception become abstract, prismatic tapestries. Here, the senses no longer suffer separation into different channels: sound and vision and touch become thoroughly enmeshed as Skrabalak pushes against limits of the sentence. Goes on now except) teems with visceral pleasures. And yet across this exquisite decomposition runs a dark humor and hatred of authority that buoys the whole enterprise and keeps it from ever becoming too exquisite. Skrabalak reminds us, "Sir this is a convex prosody megavector. Sir this is a genus."
–Laura Jaramillo

CONSTANTIN CONSTANTIUS, in his report on repetition, writes, “You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question.” Ryan Skrabalak's Goes on now except) is a trip into repetition and out of immobilization which arrives at “any day waking” where “any day waking is a new poet.” Repetition, here as always, is difference. The poet has sunk into his own body like a canoe. “Presently in the canoe I offered the disruption of my person or an event” (long fall) “of just so barely sequenced utterance.” The canoe body of the poet (the drunken boat or barely floating skiff) goes over the falls of the page and the paragraph/poem, in which I feel the presence of Basho’s haibun, a broken sentence that finds its period after a long fall, a disruption that is an offering “of my person or an event / of just so barely sequenced utterance.” The poet hangs on to the poem or hangs off it, the poem hangs off the page, the page hangs off the poem, the reader (this reader) hangs on to dear life disrupted into sequence, a harmony “of haptic notes,” Go[ing] on now except)
–Richard Meier

Is it weird that I kind of want to rock out to Goes on now except)? I’m moved by its playful attention to sound, and by the catharsis the line produces—often through pressure, friction, and fragmentation. The language of topography, science, and bureaucracy rubs up against the lyric, building an orogeny of sensation I can only describe as musical. Equally moving is the emotional shift between devastation—disgust with one's country, a “superplace” estranged from its own people—which gives way, often in the span of a second, to love(!) for a field, the sun, digital flowers (“Red roses pass through me at 1080p”), a hotel pool “clapping almost,” and somehow even the concept of time…(“did the meter of being wake me up”)? Skrabalak scores a world for a reader so they can attempt a vision as vibrant, or frankly, as cool.
—Ariel Yelen

"In reading and rereading this book, I fall into a shape of feeling too wide for me to name because it's caused by the poem recursively glimpsing how the order of a particular perceiving body is made of what exceeds perception. Ryan Skrabalak has me seeing through a kaleidoscopic swath of betweens, would that I might remain in the form and movement that this book's flow states let open."
—Lewis Freedman

ISBN: 979-8-9916468-5-7

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Ryan Skrabalak most recently wrote National Lube (speCt!, 2024) and the chapbooks The Orchids (above/ground press, 2025) and ASSEMBLED CLIMATE (Oxeye Press, 2026). He lives in “Kingston, NY” where he hosts a reading and performance series, DOGPARK, and edits a small press and occasional tape label, Spiral Editions.