(5) Soft Cell, “Tainted Love”
squeaked by
(11) Big Country, “In a Big Country”
224-221
and will play in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/25/23.

BUHM BUHM: irene cooper on “tainted love”

The primary image is disembodied: me seeing me in the backseat of a rust-ruffled Ford Country Squire station wagon, aurally bathed in the subject of this essay. And isn’t that always at issue, this idea of being in or out of the body, or of realizing the Schrodinger state of being both in and out of the body until some practical, clinical asshole says different.

I am sixteen, July 17, 1982, and soon to be headed to Rio de Janeiro as a Rotary exchange student, when the synthpop single peaks at #8. It is entirely lost on me, though not for long, that I am to be released from the paranoid Catholic lockbox of my childhood into the technicolor (albeit still Catholic) extravaganza that (to my virgin eyes) is coastal Brasil.
I am not, at this point, a virgin by choice. In 1982, presumably straight Catholic boys in Queens are less tempted to sin than one might presume.
Gloria Jones records the original version of “Tainted Love” and releases it as a B side in 1965, the year of my birth. Jones re-records it in 1976, and includes it on the album Vixen, produced by her lover, glam rock icon Marc Bolan, of T. Rex. In choosing to cover the single, Soft Cell duo Marc Almond and David Ball cite Bolan, as well as the rough and ready UK Northern soul club scene—manifested in clubs such as Va in Bolton and Wigan Casino, which spin Black American soul music out of Chicago and Detroit almost exclusively—as major musical and aesthetic influences.
Soul. Glam. Industrial. Conceptual. Wowza.
And then there’s the video. WTF.

July 17, 1982, is seven months and six days away from Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, the final day of Carnival, the celebration that precedes Lent, the Catholic period of deprivation before Easter. Growing up in a predominantly Irish enclave in Queens, I understand the sere implications of Ash Wednesday. The absence of meat on Fridays, the giving up of one’s pleasures—be that chocolate or bread or alcohol or, secretly, masturbation—is an imitative martyrdom endemic to what I understand as faith, and subsequent redemption. Sacrifice is holy; just say no. Nothing comes before Lent, and Lent is always coming.
Plucked from the muffled greyscale grit of a Jacob Riis photograph, I would drop, that next February, into the psychedelia of a Pablo Amaringo painting, 3D and fully animated, sound up. During Carnaval do Brasil, parades of samba school dancers, strategically feathered and blindingly bedazzled, lead a six-day party in an ecstatic orgy of indulgence that almost requires the restorative promise of forty days of sobriety. It’s a suspension of reality, a free pass on no-holds-barred dancing, drinking, and sex that ceases, cleanly, according to doctrine, on the threshold of the most somber liturgical observance in Catholicism.
A week or so before Carnaval, I am travelling in the north, in the Amazonian city of Manaus, staying with friends of my Carioca (Rio de Janeiro-based) host family. I am seventeen and still, reluctantly, a virgin. The couple who has welcomed me into their home are in their twenties (perhaps the man is thirty), and new parents. The woman is preternaturally gorgeous, if visibly tired. The man smiles at me a lot, says, repeatedly, I should stay in the north for Carnaval.
The woman takes me aside at some point to warn me about lança-perfume. My Portuguese is not yet fluent, but I manage to get the gist of it: lança-perfume (akin to poppers) is a mix of ethyl chloride and scent, emitted from a pressurized canister and inhaled for a quick and short-lived rush. During Carnaval, it is not uncommon, the lovely woman tells me, for someone to sneak up on an unsuspecting (non-consensual) other party with a blast of lança-perfume. Along with the high, I learn many years later, ethyl chloride ingestion can result in arrythmia, diminished motor coordination, dizziness, drowsiness, slurring of speech, loss of feeling in the legs, and hallucination. I have yet, at seventeen, to hear the phrase, rape drug. It’s all in good fun, the madonna says. There’s a song about it. But I am made aware: giving oneself up to the moment is not necessarily an act of generosity; it can, instead, look and feel a lot like sacrifice. The lamb does not consent.

In the video of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Marc Almond’s disembodied head leers over the cosmic boredom of a young man tormented with sleeplessness, subjected to the intrusion of fiery blue balls of light and the cage-dancing antics of two mudflap girl starlight demons more interested in each other than in him (though he is clearly, also, disinterested). Almond is Puck, is Mephistopheles, is a Pee Wee Herman’s evil cousin of a second-tier god, toying with the virgin, whose dream and subsequent awakening lie somewhere outside his closet of an apartment.
My own sexual awakening, unbeknownst to me, is concurrent with the emergence of what would be an epidemic of HIV and AIDS. I live in Houston after returning stateside from Rio. House of Pies in Montrose is more tenderly known as House of Guys. I work at a Stack ‘n Stash with Milton Doolittle. We sell fashionable doodads to organize one’s various closets. Still relatively recently deflowered, my worst case scenario involves herpes, maybe chlamydia, the odd crab. Milton, barely forty, eschews the clubs that yet pulse and throb with young men, is perpetually trying to quit smoking, and has a penchant for eating cold casseroles over the sink, despite intestinal troubles. He asks me to go with him to visit a friend in the hospital. Milton is afraid of hospitals. We bring a king-sized bag of M&Ms. A man who might have been young lies in a bed behind a curtain at the end of the ward. He is skeletal, and lesioned, and somehow funny, in his whisperings.
AIDS is wildfire and information is repressed, as it will be for years to come. There is medical infighting and a proprietary tussle between western nations over research of a disease that is not being mitigated, let alone championed.
In July 1982, Terry Higgins dies, the first acknowledged British casualty of AIDS. In 1982, AIDS is still widely held to be a Gay disease, a reckoning for a tainted love contained to a so-called deviant population.
In September 1982, the Tylenol Murders terrorize Chicago. In December 1982, surgeons perform the first heart transplant into a human, who lives 112 days. Also in December, Time’s “Man of the Year” is not a man, but a computer. By 1982, everything is or will be tainted: the water, the air, and of course, love. We know a kid one block over who jumps to his death, full of yearning and poisoned hope. Occasionally, a leaking body is found in the trunk of an abandoned car in the Kmart parking lot, across from the tennis courts. A ninth grade girl goes into labor in the stairwell of the E wing of the junior high school. Purity, in respect to that which is untainted and untouched, is not a thing, and certainly not a thing to be confused with innocence, a state of being wholly separate from inexperience. Innocence, in our case, does not preclude knowledge, but absorbs it, transcends it. Aspirationally, to be innocent is not to be unbroken, but to live joyously in defiance of the caustic drippings of those legacies that would make broken our only signifier.

New Zealander singer-songwriter Lorde’s 2021 cover image for her album Solar Power celebrates this kind of freedom with the depiction, photographed from below, of her very own taint, a slang term for the part of the body defined as the area of sensitive skin between the genitals (scrotum or vagina) and the anus; the perineum. Taint this, taint that. Tis, though.
For release in China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the image of Lorde’s taint is obscured by a sunburst. Sunlight is, for all purposes, shining right out her ass. “[H]oly light,” one Weibo user in China suggested. And indeed, the image recalls the prominent print of a crucifix emitting heavenly light that hung in my grandmother’s boarding house.
Taint obscured or in full view, Lorde’s cover reads unavoidably wholesome. Is this a generational shift, this sun-kissed embrace of oneself? But then I remember all the beautiful men and women on Ipanema beach, back in 1982, a slip of lycra to keep the sand out of the bits, bodies burnished and glowing and turning to and loved by the sun; me in my second-hand maillot, prim as a pre-Vatican II habit, shame-splotched patches of exposed Irish-Scottish flesh blistering at the suggestion of freedom and vitamin D. Love and light (as in sunlight—not neon, not dashboard, not the cloaked glow of a streetlamp) was not how I experienced, or how I believed I could experience, love. I thought (I may yet think): One must be seeded and grow in the sun to be of the sun.  

Voiced by Almond, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” is an exaggerated wink at the indulgences and excesses of the moment, a pleather-chapped nose-thumbing to the would-be utopians of the previous decade. You can smell the cocaine, it’s been said. Jones’ earlier, arguably more soulful rendition is plaintive. She’s got to—buhm-buhm—get away. In Soft Cell’s video, while the young man does indeed flee the teasing of the two curvaceous star-figures, it feels less like an escape and more like a rejection of a heteronormative fantasy.
In the 1980s, Pee Wee Herman, aka, Paul Reubens, animates Pee Wee’s Playhouse. A childlike jester, Pee Wee embodies both innocence and bedevilment. Never sinister, Pee Wee yet emits a whiff of grown-up naughtiness, an awareness that is both costumed in and elucidated through heavily made-up character. Truth and complexity otherwise inexpressible can sometimes breathe through the veil of entertainment, the arena within which such dichotomies of innocence and knowing are allowed. But only within. Without the suit and the bowtie and the makeup, there’s just Paul Reubens, getting arrested in Florida for lewd conduct—reportedly masturbating in a pornographic theater, which was presumably pretty dark and likely hosting other people engaged in similar behavior. Gay, as Black, is an acceptable anomaly in entertainment: a costume, a stage persona, acceptable—celebrated—as long as it remains contained to the arena. Self-love: Tainted love.
Unless the situation calls for a pariah. Should anyone be tempted to confuse the popularity of the resurrected Queer Eye as evidence of widespread social progressiveness, the father of the man who shoots up the LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs in 2022 provides a reality check when he tells the press that he thanks his god his son wasn’t in the club to dance, that he wasn’t infected with the gay. Whew.

Other covers of “Tainted Love” include recordings by Marilyn Manson (2001) and by Spanish cover band Broken Peach (2021). The latter, especially recorded for Halloween, features three zombie insane asylum patients playing guitar, bass, and drums, along with three zombie nurses performing vocals. The undead: Tainted love.
Broken Peach’s version mixes in riffs from Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” and what one YouTube commenter identified as the intro from German hard rock’s Rammstein’s Deutschland. Controversy exists over whether Rammstein’s philosophy is, as the band maintains, left wing; or if it promotes, as some critics insist, a right wing national agenda, the very agenda that manifested the Holocaust. Nationalism, as Fundamentalism: Tainted love.
In an interview with fellow Soft Cell member Dave Ball, Marc Almond talks about their efforts at the onset of the endeavor to turn their art school, multi-media aspirations into something commercially attractive. Almond uses the term, Industrial Cabaret. Ball suggests they were after an amalgam of Northern soul + Kraftwerk; Almond chimes in that maybe they were more like Kraftwerk meets Judy Garland—Kraftwerk being the iconic pioneers of electronic pop.
The original members of Kraftwerk (trans., power plant), Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, cite influences from German Expressionism including film directors Fritz Lang (Metropolis), and F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), as well as architects of future-focused and unsentimental movements such as New Objectivism and Bauhaus. The period after World War I and before World War II was, for Germany, a highly creative and artistically dynamic moment, and not a naïve one. No one didn’t know trouble lay ahead. But some artists and thinkers tried to stem it.
Of Kraftwerk’s ambitions later in the century, Simon Reynolds of NPR Music writes, “Kraftwerk were inventing the '80s…Crucially, it was music stripped of individualized inflection and personality, no hint of a solo or even a flourish. ‘We go beyond all this individual feel…We are more like vehicles, a part of our mensch machine, our man-machine.’”
Reynolds talks about riding in a car on the actual Autobahn between the Black Forest and Cologne,  listening to Kraftwerk’s music: “It might have been…‘Autobahn’ itself—I had to [BUHM-BUHM] turn my face away and look fixedly out of the window to hide my tears. I’m not sure why the music, so free of anguish and turmoil, has this paradoxical effect. But…[it has] to do with what Lester Bangs called the ‘intricate balm’ supplied by the music itself: calming, cleansing, gliding along placidly yet propulsively, it's a twinkling and kindly picture of heaven.”
Gloria Jones is at the wheel when Marc Bolan dies in a car accident at 29. Clean, self-propelling machines that they are, Schneider and Hütter travel from venue to venue by touring bike. By July 17, 1982, I have no taste for sloppy tragedy or fresh air utopia, but I crave, oh, how I crave, the inflection. How I ache for flourish.

Despite Soft Cell’s spoken aspirations to the likes of Kraftwerk, something is most definitely lost (or scuttled) in translation. There is no heaven in Soft Cell’s driving “Tainted Love.” I do not cry in the backseat of the station wagon (going nowhere), nor do I feel cleansed. Technically pure, I am scoured, too, by the scraping losses of the seventies, and broken enough to let in a kind of joy, even innocence, forged in ruin, sharp as Eliot’s shards, crusted in last night’s cocaine shared among last night’s friends and lovers at the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that is 1982, if I can make my way to the right dimly lit place, away from the basements and fluorescent sprawl and mall-infested interstates of suburban paranoia. Love is all there is, teases the emcee through the greasepaint, and isn’t it resplendent, tainted through and through.
Touch me, Baby, please.

Irene Cooper is the author of Found, crime thriller noir set in Colorado, Committal, poet-friendly spy-fy about family, & spare change, finalist for the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry. Writings appear in Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, The Rumpus, streetcake, Witness, & elsewhere. Irene is co-founder of The Forge writing program & Blank Pages Workshops. She teaches in community & supports AIC-directed creative writing at a regional prison, & lives with her people & Maggie in Oregon. irenecooperwrites.com

ADAM O. DAVIS ON “IN A BIG COUNTRY”

I’M NOT EXPECTING TO GROW FLOWERS IN THE DESERT

This may be true. A long time ago, a group of intrepid Scots, fed up with Viking pillaging and English incursion, built a boat and sailed west into parts unknown. After months of seafaring, the unknown part they encountered was what would come to be called Florida. Paradisical as it may be to the contemporary European tourist, it was not then to those wanderlusting Scots. This was before Miami, before DEET, before Epcot. The weather was too hot and the alligators too dragon-like. So said Scots got back into their boat and headed north where they found a craggy outpost of frigid rock and, finding it so much like home, named it Nova Scotia. New Scotland. And there they remained for centuries in a familiar cold far, far away from the prospect of vacation rentals and fan boats.

I CAN LIVE AND BREATHE AND SEE THE SUN IN WINTERTIME

The title of Big Country’s biggest hit, “In a Big Country,” achieves the rare feat of namechecking the band that performs it without sounding trite (consider how poorly U2 might have fared with “With or Without U2” or Queen with “Queen Will Rock You” or Def Leppard with “Pour Some Sugar on Joe Elliot”). It creates a kind of aural Droste effect: Big Country plays a song about being in a big country which may be Big Country. Or, the land is the band is the land. And the band is of the land. Formed in 1981 between the Firth of Tay and Firth of Fourth—right where the upper teeth would be in the anthropomorphic mouth of the old Walker’s crisps adverts—Big Country sounds Scottish. Deeply Scottish. But it ain’t because of the bagpipes. Namely because there are none.

IN A BIG COUNTRY DREAMS STAY WITH YOU

Scotland is an iconoclastic country. Idiosyncratic and proud. Where Cola-Cola comes in second to the national soda of choice, Irn-Bru, whose famously rusty hue (“Made in Scotland from girders”)—the result of two colorants that require a warning label about the potential for causing ADHD in children—is so potent at staining carpets (and everything else) that it has, according to The Scotsman, “become the liquid of choice among unscrupulous individuals looking to fool their insurance firms.” This mixture of national pride and stubborn defiance is something of a Scottish hallmark. The kind of polarity that makes for potent mixture of myth and commerce, particularly when applied to the more unique aspects of Scottish culture. Say Scotch. Or bagpipes. Or tartans. Or Nessie, haggis, Robert Burns, shortbread, Irvine Welsh novels, the proper maintenance of dilithium crystals, and the best James Bond ever. In this, there’s something indisputably tangible about the idea of Scotland in the things of Scotland—or, at least, the ideas foreigners have about Scotland (particularly those foreigners who, like me, claim Scottish ancestry). An idea that has something to do with longing. Longing for old places. And for new ones.

THAT’S A DESPERATE WAY TO LOOK FOR SOMEONE WHO IS STILL A CHILD

My middle initial stands for Ogilvie. The name of the Scottish clan my ancestors belonged to. They had a castle (in ruins), a tartan (quite tasteful), and a motto (“a fin,” Latin for “to the end”). They were, I’ve been told, horse thieves and priests. The horse thieves were hanged. It’s upon this past that I hang my hedging ways—he who’d love to be a bankrobber if only he could handle the guilt. But there’s another version of this story. One without piety and executions and in their place a bit of social climbing, a man looking to move up in the world by adopting his wife’s name as his own. A tale of aspiration rather than expiration. Less fun that the first but more honest. How a person finds their way out of one life and into another. What they give up to get somewhere better.

YOU CAN’T STAY HERE WITH EVERY SINGLE HOPE YOU HAD SHATTERED

Big Country is a tale of two bands. The first—the Skids—begat the second—the aforementioned B.C. Despite commercial success and opening for The Clash, Stuart Adamson was frustrated by the lack of creative control he had in the Skids, so he gave it up and found new bandmates—guitarist Bruce Watson, bassist Tony Butler, and drummer Mark Brzezicki—and named his new band Big Country. In doing so, he named the sound and the weight of his ambition. Something epic, something Scottish, something that would redeem the dreams he held for the sonic landscape in his head. Knowing this, in “In a Big Country,” I believe Adamson’s singing to Adamson, exhorting himself Mickey Goldmill-style to rise up from off the floor screaming and fulfill his musical promise. To keep striving against the odds. To succeed. The plea is equal parts desperation, defiance, and hope. And it worked. And then it didn’t.

SO TAKE THAT LOOK OUT OF HERE IT DOESN’T FIT YOU

If there was a shadow over Big Country, it was U2 though, ironically, U2 had initially been in their shadow—or at least debt. If Adamson’s first band was an inspiration to U2 (who covered their song, “The Saints Are Coming,” with Green Day in 2006), his second band was their doppelgänger. Outside of the Edge’s jangling atmospherics there’s no more iconic guitar sound from the 1980s than that of Stuart Adamson’s Fender Stratocaster filtered through many a foot pedal. And in the beginning it seemed that the scales of success were tipped in Big Country’s favor. John Peel, the legendary British musical kingmaker, rejected U2’s advances but praised Adamson as “a new Jimi Hendrix.” Even the Edge went on to claim at Adamson’s funeral that Big Country wrote the songs U2 wished they had written. Both bands even the same producer—Steve Lillywhite—who in 1983 produced U2’s War, Simple Mind’s Sparkle in the Rain, and Big Country’s The Crossing. There was no doubt this band could deliver. And they did. And then, somehow, it wasn’t enough. Part of it was timing. Burnt out by the band’s success and drinking too much, Adamson threatened to quit Big Country in 1985. Though he may not have been serious, gossip turned it definitive and Bob Geldof, believing they’d broken up, didn’t invite them to perform at Live Aid where U2 played to tremendous results. Their star ascendant while Big Country’s faltered, perhaps also thanks to the flexibility they had that Big Country didn’t. Though deeply Irish, U2 never sounded Irish in the way Big Country sounded Scottish. They slipped musical skins while Big Country proudly grew further into theirs. They were the country and the country was them.

CRY OUT FOR EVERYTHING YOU EVER MIGHT HAVE WANTED

How to create a hit Scottish single:

Exhibit A: The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”

Exhibit B: Travis’ “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?”

Exhibit C: Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out”

Exhibit D: Bay City Rollers’ “Saturday Night”

Each song is a stone-cold Caledonian classic whose beat is that of a military tattoo (sometimes lilting, sometimes lashing) and whose chorus is that of a Hibs match. But none of them surpass the anthemic beauty of “In a Big Country.” None can touch its ecstatic folk harmonies whose ear-blistering guitarwork threatens—but never falls into—anarchy. Though the aforementioned songs pack plenty of punch—The Proclaimers’ charmingly irreverent ambulatory romance, Travis’ rousing faux-miserable ode to precipitation, Franz Ferdinand’s stomping kata-like plea for love or assassination, and the Bay City Rollers’ orthographic celebration of S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night and all the things that might happen (dancing, rock and roll, solemn declarations of love) on said night—none can hold a candle to Big Country’s barbaric yawp delivered by way of an MXR Pitch Transposer (I repeat: There are no bagpipes in this song) that’s the musical equivalent of, God help me, William Wallace yelling alba gu bràth for four straight minutes. The song is pure rabblerousing joy. A cathartic scream against insignificance, against despair. A demented highland jig (see: the jaunty fling two be-denimed lads conduct onstage during a live performance by the band on The Tube) blasted out of a cannon as soon as the drums—rat-tat-tata-tat! rat-tat-tata-tat!—kick in. And that twin guitar attack. It’s like eagles. Like how eagles would shriek. If they were electronic and joyfully aflame. 

ANOTHER PROMISE FALLEN THROUGH ANOTHER SEASON PASSES BY YOU

On December 29th, 1993, Big Country played a show at Glasgow’s Barrowlands. After thanking the audience and before launching into “In a Big Country,” Stuart Adamson says “I’ve got just one more thing to say. Stay alive.”

LIKE A LOVER’S VOICE FIRES THE MOUNTAINSIDE

Not shot in the Big Country itself but Dorset, the music video plays like a low-budget The Goonies. The band is on a treasure hunt. The treasure: a box marked BIG COUNTRY. But keeping Big Country from finding Big Country is a suitably emo PVC-clad woman who spends three-minutes-and-forty-five seconds committing robbery, setting houses on fire, punching the lead singer in the face for no reason, and totally smoking the band on their Zodiac raft as she blasts by on a Sea-Doo (have I mentioned how vehicle-heavy this video is?). But then she finds herself stranded in a cove where Adamson rescues her by abseiling (that’s rappelling to you Yanks) down a cliff for which he receives a chaste hug and some handholding. But! The drummer discovers the stolen box in a kelp bed. The band has found the treasure. The treasure of themselves. In the background of all this, the band performs in the kind of smoky, laser-lit netherworld all Thatcher-era bands were contractually obliged to film videos in. They play on as the song fades in that classic 1980’s way that suggests the song never ends. Which, in the case of this song, it never does. No matter where you might find yourself in the world, it’s on the radio somewhere. 

I THOUGHT PAIN AND TRUTH WERE THINGS THAT REALLY MATTERED

When considering the suicide of an artist the question inevitably arises: Did their work point to their end? Such thinking often provides for a kind of grieving hagiography whose emphasis on a throughline from art to death isn’t for the artist’s benefit but the audience’s. Ah, we say, now it all makes sense. Now we can move on. But “In a Big Country” isn’t a song you can move on from. There’s something tidal about it, the way it ebbs and flows between joy and despair—a tension that, when balanced right, makes for timeless tunes. How the propulsive, arpeggiated drive of the melody nearly overwhelms the lyrical darkness whose growing pleas to cry out for everything you might have ever wanted become more triumphant the more desperate they grow. A song that’s as much war cry as cry for help. But maybe I’m reading too much into it. As the band’s drummer, Mark Brzezicki told Classic Rock, “Only in hindsight I’ve started looking at the lyrics and I’m starting to go, ‘Hang on a minute—the writing’s there. This guy was saying it all along.’ Or was he? I don’t know.”

I NEVER TOOK THE SMILE AWAY FROM ANYBODY’S FACE

Roughly 300 million years ago, Scotland was a volcanic vacation spot slowly making way for the incoming Atlantic Ocean. Where once it had been fused to America and Europe, it would eventually head north where its tropical temperament would be cooled by ice sheets. Both Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat sit on extinct volcanoes so Oahu must have looked strangely familiar to the boy who had grown up in Dunfermline near the Lomond Hills. So far from home and yet home, this Scotsman seeking paradise. This Scotsman who, suffering increasingly from alcoholism, found the sun in wintertime. On December 16th, 2001, nearly a month after being reported missing, Adamson would be found dead in his Honolulu hotel room.

BECAUSE IT’S HAPPENED DOESN’T MEAN YOU’VE BEEN DISCARDED

Countries are ideas we give bodies to. Those bodies ideas we call home. Songs, too, are like countries. They speak to who we were before we became who we are and who we hope we might still become. Ambition and reality filtered through the alchemy of a name. “In a Big Country” is a country unto itself. A great country, this song-shaped country. That it was Big Country’s only top 20 American hit doesn’t diminish it—it makes it all the more precious. We have to hold tight to such miracles, such songs that demand, like Rilke demanded, that we change our lives. That we get up screaming. That we stay alive.

Adam O. Davis learned to read and write in Scotland. He’d also drink an Irn-Bru over a Coke any day of the week. He’s the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), the recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Award and the 2016 George Bogin Award from the Poetry Society of America, and his work has appeared in The Believer, The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. More at www.adamodavis.com.