About

What this is

Iris, The Absurd is a book of poems, if they are poems, written on a phone in the moment and never edited, through a season in which several people I loved died within a little over a year: some suddenly, some after long illness. Most were family; one was a friend. My mother was among them, after a cancer she fought for two and a half years, and most of these were written while that was happening and in the months after.

It is published under the name B. Myriel, and it will stay that way, so that it can be honest. Some names are a letter and a dash, as Hugo wrote the Bishop of D--. Some details are changed so that no one can be found through them. There are no dates anywhere, on purpose. The order the poems were written in is kept; it is the only clock.

It is free to read here. Visits are counted by HopperLabs' own analytics and by no one else; nothing else is collected.

Start with the difference between a cry and a work, or open the book.