꥟ CROP CIRCLE PRESS ꥟
BEING TOWARDS DEATH___MIKE CORRAO___AUTUMN 2025
Yr wounds open like a window
Where I'm t h r a s h i n g
In the garden’s sepulchers
Where I'm t h r a s h i n g
In the garden’s sepulchers
"This work of unnerving beauty investigates the virtual that was always held within the cupped hand of the Decadence: the wormtrack in the lung, the skeletal hand that points the way to Paradise. Maybe Paradise is a spiky garden, maybe it's made of light, maybe a Piranesan prison, lit blue by a cathode-ray tube showing El Topo. It's always midnight in this thought. Maybe it's on its way, maybe it's doomed, maybe it's solitude, or maybe we're in it together, already, in the future, something new. What will that be. What will that have been."—JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
"Like splicing grindcore lyrics onto impossible digital sculpture sites, Being Towards Death reads like an all-monochrome minimalist RPG gassed with the aura of the iconic Unknown Pleasures logo. Mike Corrao’s uncanny knack for unpacking our present day hellscape into its component bits and bugs hits like a digital designer drug you aren’t likely to remember how to unsee." —BLAKE BUTLER
"Being Towards Death reads as a series of gorgeous glitches, doing what good poetry should always do: expose the ways we derange language and our selves through it. After reading, you'll return to the SMS messages, social media doomscrolls, and AI slop reels where our language lives today with a better sense of what's going on and how it's changing you." —AIDAN WALKER
The voice tells you: “We are living in times of exceptional instability.” Extreme and unresolvable polarities compose the foundation of the text: collapse + creation; confusion + elation; hilarity + hypnosis; concealment + omniscience. Being Towards Death presents a cruelty severe enough to manipulate the framework of matter and life itself.
The work resists traditional genre conformity entirely. Corrao’s structural, architectonic illustrations spill over the text in designs of chaos and unrest. They act as winding roads among a landscape where language suffocates on itself, backdropped by climate anxiety, housing inequality, and poverty.
Although you’ll exit Being Towards Death, its design will stay woven inside you, gouging permanent structures into your psyche. Even after the world returns, glimmers of Corrao’s Molochian underworld still slip through its seams. 𖣥
MIKE CORRAO is the author of a number of works including the novels, Gut Text (11:11 Press) and Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press); the poetry collections,The Persimmon is an Event (Broken Sleep Books) and Under Reef(Onomatopee Projects); the plays Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle) and Cephalonegativity (Apocalypse Party); and the essay collection, Surface Studies (Action Books). His work blends writing and book design to explore themes of autonomy, climate anxiety, and anti-capitalism. 𖣥