Schopenhauer's Dog, by Andy Mallory

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Schopenhauer’s Dog is a poetic and prosaic exploration of death, desire, and the inextricable relationship between the two. Its central conceit is that our consciousness of death and our capacity for yearning are conditioned by one another.

The pieces collected in Schopenhauer’s Dog aim to map out the contours of this conditioning and, by doing so, glimpse the endlessly bountiful terrain where grief and desire materialize concurrently. In the gardenways of the human spirit — wherever these affects pass over and through us in their dialectical dance — a shrewd cultivator might encounter not only the most magnificent flowers, but also the equally beautiful, decomposed matter from which they grow.

Andy (they/he) is a musician, bartender, and philosophy instructor. On weekends they scream and make funny sounds for the band Dooryard Lobotomy. They are also the author of the prose poetry chapbook Four Seasons Of Ghosts from Alien Buddha Press (2023). They currently live in Maine with their partner and two parrots. They can be found on Instagram and Twitter (@witheringvessel).