Failure Modes

Failure Modes is a collection of lyric diagnostics-compressed poems that map psychological states as system behaviors rather than personal confession.

Organized into seven domains-signal intrusion, somatic malfunction, affective collapse, identity fracture, relational distortion, stored trauma, and rhythmic misalignment-the book treats mental disorders not as narratives to be explained, but as environments to be entered.

Each piece functions as a "voice file": brief, sensory, and structural. Clinical codes appear not to define the poems, but to frame them-like labels on circuit boards, fault reports, or black boxes recovered after impact. The language is spare, physical, and unsentimental. Water, fire, pressure, latency, rupture, and drift recur as organizing forces.

This is not self-help.
It is not memoir.
It does not explain, resolve, or reassure.

Failure Modes is for readers drawn to poetry that behaves like a system-where meaning emerges through compression, repetition, and failure itself. The result is a diagnostic lyric field: precise, austere, and quietly unsettling.