Feeling Extremely Fatigued in California, by Nick Minges

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

An expert mix of journal and elegy, Extremely Fatigued follows the thoughts, footfalls, and poems of our intrepid speaker through the dizzied weekend following the notice of a friend’s death. Minges’ work is a force of grief that leaves nothing out, from extinct internet message boards to taco places to pool halls, from Rimbaud and Keats to Sartre and Spider-Man. Through constant rain, plumbing disasters and sleeplessness, Minges pays respect to tradition while firmly rooting us in a syrupy and momentumless present. Exhausted, surreal, sarcastic, and musical, these poems interrogate reality, philosophy, art, and the self with a voice that rejects easy answers and meanders instead toward the possibility of song.

“Like icarus on a fucked VHS, our speaker flies, approaches the sun, blinks, and finds himself imprisoned once more, dreaming of escape and speaking it into existence.”

—Briel Brown

Nick Minges lives in Sacramento, California. His work has been in The Adroit Journal, The Bat City Review, Borderlands, HASH, Santa Clara Review, and others. He is a former reader and copy-editor for the late Levee Magazine and holds an MFA from Saint Mary’s College.