What to read after We Were Hateful People?

We Were Hateful People is a collection of poems that traces five interweaving stories, or perhaps one story in five parts.

A man from a faraway land meets an impossible woman on an island. this town is small / and full of curves and hills and rises A man falls in love; a creative union forms, followed by marriage. the night is an orgasm on wheels / festooned with dirt and peonies A man faces the sound and the fury of his own mind, and another's. everything can collapse at any moment / th moist brown earth opens up & eats you A man and a woman suffer; a marital union dissolves creatively. th wife coils into a snake / th mind coils into a snake A man uses his poetic craft to make the island his own.

In these poems, Michael G. Khmelnitsky delves into and confronts cultural and linguistic otherness, closeted queerness, neurodivergence, trauma, relationships, and mental illness. He also pays tribute in content and form to the poetic and publishing practices of the 1970s, from the elegant typesetting of every letter to the exploration of the creation, assumption, and performance of alter and subaltern egos.