WINDOWS 85

by Chris Campanioni

If this is a book about the body, it is about what happens when the body disappears—dispersed across a range of formats and mediated through multiple screens. If this is a book of poems about want, it is an ode to desire that necessarily exceeds the physical. Windows 85 explores self-commodification, networked intimacy, and epistolary affect within our tenuous media infrastructures in pursuit of a migratory ecopoetics, channeling both the generative frictions of today and an adolescence prior to our contemporary obligations wrought by always-on media.

Steeped in digital cultures and multimedia and multilingual teaching and learning as so much of the poet’s research and publications are, alongside his work with students—a corpus of Chris Campanioni’s artistic practice, pedagogy, and scholarship that has been christened by other writers as “post internet”—Windows 85 is less a collection than a cyberspace opera, admitting not autobiography but the traffic of immediacy and distance, attachment and dispersal, the serendipitous or systematized encounters that emerge between bodies, not all of which are human. Memory, proximity, and imminence entangle in these liminal exchanges as languages adjoin and subject(s)/positions commingle in polyphonic rhapsody.

Rather than understand what follows as a narrative in the conventional sense, readers are invited to enter into this book—a portal, a window—as an experience, and the experience as immersion. Continuous and discontinuous, a relation of our everyday that is not linear but synchronous, layered, looped, cut, copied, dragged… and recorded. 

Keywords: glitch, diaspora, digital intimacy, media theory, migration, sexuality studies

People are Saying:

Poems full of slippages navigating various multiplicities, with the lightness and promiscuity of their language bouncing off the page … more like encountering an avant pop album than a book of poetry. But of course there’s a political undercurrent to all of this: its insistence on leaping across borders suggested by radical enjambments and the toggling between personas, media and all sorts of binaries—a fiercely contemporary thesis dismantling the perceived primacy of said borders and binaries.
— Christodoulos Makris, Books Ireland

You’re doing what the Cubists did to painting but in lyric form …
— Tiffany Troy, Los Angeles Review

A work whose chaotic feminine essence transcends material. … Campanioni toys with stuff you’re not supposed to touch, and normies are right to clutch pearls. Postmodernism thrives on taboo. … Windows 85 reads like Carl Phillips’ garden-path-y syntax on speed. Toward some poems’ ends their clauses snowball and accelerate pingponging and daisy chaining off to negative and positive infinity at once. … Compression and extraction, encryption and decryption – the yoking recalls a neural net’s black-box insides. And yet the work portends rebellion against LLMs’ soullessly sterile mien, Campanioni’s a war cry for artists to meet ChatGPT in its nightmares. It unites the egoic and the erotic theories of neurosis. … These poems are sleekly phone-thin, stanzas text-bubble-sized. I’d call it addictively scrollable if it were a scroll. … The work exudes that untraceable, unkillable remnant that squeezes between pixels, expands the more you push it away. … Irreverence has never been so justified.
— Nat Alonso, Rhino Reviews

Agile, precise, flamboyant, and even promiscuous, equal parts postcolonial and neobaroque in exultant devotion to a literature of cosmology: Campanioni’s exuberant style somehow defies the consumerist logics of late capitalism … the language is pastiche, its rhythm and movement somehow resonant with both the situationists, who tried to recapture desire from capitalism and save the everyday from alienated labor, and the diasporic avant-garde, like Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, and Aubrey Williams. Like shiny wrecks, Campanioni’s poems denaturalize the technocratic norms of postmodernity and, paradoxically, refamiliarize readers with the singularity of their own sensations and perceptions. Windows 85 is a spectacle of depth and duration where the ‘lyric / I’ is redeemed.
— Kendra Sullivan, Los Angeles Review of Books

Windows 85 is a demonstration of intensive attention utilizing the width and brea(d)th of, while pushing at the constraints of, symbol that is language. … Campanioni touches on everything from Paul Klee to Vanna White to Leslie Cheung to CNN and Goethe and Althusser. But never is a reference intrusive; one of the collection’s greatest strengths is a brilliant fluency between culture and body. … Through his work, we the readers, like the speaker(s), are looking in, but also looking at ourselves. This is a collection that at once stimulates curiosity while demanding self-interrogation as to how we move in the world. … The project of Windows 85 could easily overwhelm an average poet, but in Campanioni’s hands, the agile enjambment, carefully wrought punctuation, and measured overwhelming-ness of it all culminates in a syntax and diction peering into self as other and world, frequently playful even at its most serious. … Chris Campanioni has crafted a book of glimpses that feels like a meshing between C. P. Cavafy’s longing and John Ashbery’s vernacular and veering, in a voice that is evasive and distinct.
— Fernando Trujillo, Los Angeles Review

“it became necessary to stretch to let / language in”—such is the deliciously mind-and-every-limb-stretching encounter that is Windows 85. A fever dream that never forgets embodiment, an intellectual rollercoaster ride sans pretension, an erotic thriller where no one dies except the self (many times, many petites morts), this is a book to read while in the sauna, then at your favorite haunted library. This is a poet who understands that contemporary digital worlds have not replaced the sensory and bodily realms—instead, like any technology, they live alongside physical, haptic, sweat-drenched perceptions and comminglings. The digital doesn’t merely “augment reality”—it rewrites the real, again and again. So too must a poet of this endlessly fantasy-and-phantasm-filled era rewrite the real—while, ideally, “clad… / in jock strap”—in order to find a new sort of freedom, or to flirt anew: “I’ll show you my data / set if you / show me yrs.”
—Chen Chen

I love how porn-esque and abstract and multi-persona’d this book is, how it flows like thought itself, a fleshly lustful floating thinking, not wishing to land, just to stretch out, a long “fingering,” as the poet puts it. A procedure of stretching seems to be his signature—syntax, lineation, enjambment, flickering-between-personae, between genders, between subject/object, seen/seer, screen/IRL … Campanioni appears to take his cue from O’Hara’s “You Are Gorgeous and I Am Coming”—just motion itself, the throb and onwardness, an erotics/poetics of the in medias res. Other spirits summoned by Campanioni’s concoction are Ammons and Jelinek and Mayröcker and Robert Glück and Ashbery and Stein—classic masters of this stretching mode, wherein sex’s abstractness lineates itself.
—Wayne Koestenbaum

The way “genres” converge in Chris Campanioni’s Windows 85 is so good—poetry, prose, lyric, essay, the personal, the theoretical. In a world where “everything is haptic,” the seeming boundaries between various authorized selves are always already touching in alignments that intimately implicate reader and empire. Though playfully aware of their own mediation, the poems conjure time in ways that feel embodied, lyrically interrogating nostalgia as privilege and commodity. Campanioni explores the “limitations of the I” with incisive humor, ferrying readers through its displacements, rewarding us with a view of the media frameworks that try to erase themselves and us in the process.
—Matt Broaddus

Windows 85 is a winningly brazen poetry collection of a new erotics, a book in which the second person often comes first. “You” is a slippery subject “woken by the breeze / of your lens”: mirror-selves fleetingly glimpsed, or strangers misunderstood, yet longed-for. Campanioni’s headlong, minimally punctuated writing rings a round of thorny rosies, with pocketfuls, to spare, of kinky poesies amidst the before- and afterglow of queer collisions and near-misses: “so I relaxed into you / so you fucked around & found out // ensconced in my absence [...].” To be sure, Windows 85 rewards the reader with refreshing games of lyrical leapfrog. Take your place in these lines, and get ready to spring high.
—Chris Hosea

About the Author

Chris Campanioni is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays. His work on regimes of surveillance, queer migration, and the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary work and a Mellon Foundation fellowship. Chris’s multimedia art has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and the film adaptation of his poem “This body’s long & I’m still loading” was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival.Windows 85 is his debut poetry collection.