Now Approaching, by Bryan Parys

Prose poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

“I am not moving; I am being moved.”

How do you measure the distance between approaching and arrived? This is the question in Now Approaching, a prose-poetry chapbook by Bryan Parys about dissociation and the attempts to crawl back to our bodies. In the wake of religious trauma, the narrator finds themself cut off from the beliefs of their past, and thus unable to imagine a future, making the present a kind of cosmic Jell-O. Through observational fragments gathered while commuting via train to an office job, Parys wonders how it is that surroundings can feel both real yet out of reach—seeing a heron through a window, a plastic chair stuck in the mud, a commuter sighing over and over.

Each fragment approaches, then disappears. Trash piling outside a pizza place, a giant casino being built into the Boston coastline, all of it feeling So Important until the narrator tries to explain it. This is why they find it easier to talk to a can of seltzer than a human.

Written over a five-year period while seated in the quiet car on the MBTA commuter rail, Now Approaching is a work of nonfiction pushed through the filter of poetry. In other words, it is mostly real, just like the way the narrator feels. It is a kind of purgatory for those looking for evidence that they belong on earth before worrying about whether or not there’s a heaven. As Bill Moyers once said, paraphrasing Joseph Campbell, “What we don’t know informs what we do know.” Put another way, the desire to know is perhaps our only liberation.

“Bryan Parys’s Now Approaching is a perfect asymptote. We’re all just a train ride and a stone’s throw from heaven—but do we want it? Imagistic, often hilarious, insightful, and moving, Parys sees into himself as he sees into us. On a commuter rail, searching for practicality and change, Parys finds clarity and poetry instead and shakes the ‘bony maracas’ of our minds.”

—Nicole Callihan, Author of SLIP (Saturnalia 2025)

“Parys constructs a poetics of threshold—neither departure nor arrival but the suspended grammar of approach itself. The work accumulates toward what it means to be moved rather than moving.”

—Jonathan Bennett Bonilla, author of What Matters Who’s Speaking (Delere 2017)

“We may all be crows hooting like owls in our attempts of connection to the world, amidst our disconnection to ourselves. In Now Approaching, Parys offers us a Tender Buttons catalogue, a commute as a chance to commune, a search for practical knowledge while traversing the absurd experiences of both stagnation and change. Each lived day, we are “tracing an unknown shape”; this chapbook, a surprise collage of desire, direction, identity—the weighing out of what we deserve, discard, and acknowledge—shows how we construct and deconstruct our lives in environments that reflect this struggle back to us, if we are willing to observe. As Parys writes ‘The world is changing how I see the world’; Now Approaching will change how you see and at what speed.”

—Amelia Martens, author of Ursa Minor, winner of the 2018 elsewhere chapbook prize

Bryan Parys (he/they) is a writer, editor, and educator based in Greater Boston. They are the author of the memoir Wake, Sleeper (Cascade Books 2015), which explores grief in the context of a religious upbringing. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, and has appeared in Exit 7, Virga, Ruminate, Sojourners, and a number of other publications, many of which have now gone out of business.