There are books that arrive immaculate, as if pulled fully formed from some divine filament, as if they had always existed, merely waiting for a hand to lift them into the visible world.
As Already Happens is not one of those books.
This chapbook is not a finished thing; it is a pulse, a flicker, a process that resists completion.
It began in 2018—not as a book, not even as a collection of poems, but as a series of failures, as drafts abandoned and then returned to, as sentences that collapsed under their own weight, only to be rewritten, reshaped, undone again.
It is a work that stutters, loops back, doubles over itself.
It is a book that does not conclude but insists, that does not resolve but lingers.
It is poetry, yes, but more than that, it is an interrogation of its own making, a recursive act of inscription and erasure.
It is the tension between articulation and its undoing, between the moment something comes into form and the moment it dissolves.
The words in these pages are not stable—they flicker in and out of meaning, caught in the shimmering, unstable space between knowing and unknowing.
A Book That Writes and Unwrites Itself
What does it mean to name something, to capture it in language?
What does it mean to let that language slip through your fingers?
As Already Happens moves between those two impulses—the drive to inscribe and the awareness that all inscriptions are provisional.
The speaker is both architect and wrecking crew, shaping language and dismantling it in the same breath.
This is not a book of declarations.
It does not give answers.
Instead, it orbits questions, circling them the way light circles the event horizon, unable to escape yet never fully consumed.
Who speaks?
Who writes?
Who moves the hand that inscribes?
And yet, despite—or perhaps because of—its refusal to settle, this book stands as proof of the necessity of language, however fractured.
It exists because the need to reach toward articulation remains, even when words fail, even when meaning slips away as soon as it is grasped.
Related Posts:
Why This Book, Why Now?
To say that this chapbook is now “published” feels like a misnomer, as if the act of printing could fix it in place.
It is not simply a collection of poems—it is the culmination of years of struggle with the limits of expression, with the realization that some things can only be spoken in negation, in recursion, in refusal.
This is a book for those who understand that meaning is always in motion, that language is both bridge and abyss.
If you have ever felt the slipperiness of words, the way they betray even as they try to hold, then this book is for you.
If you are drawn to poetry that does not seek to resolve but to unravel, that does not offer clarity but movement, then step inside.
If this resonates, dive deeper into The Poetics of Fulfillment—a field guide for those restless for more than fleeting happiness. Not quick fixes, but lasting meaning. If you crave depth over dopamine and want fulfillment that endures, this is your next step.
Read The Poetics of Fulfillment: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop)
The Publisher: Bottlecap Press
I am honored that As Already Happens has found a home with Bottlecap Press, a publisher that understands poetry not as a static artifact, but as a living, breathing disruption.
Founded in 2014, Bottlecap has carved out a space for the urgent, the restless, the experimental.
Their books have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Dazed, Forbes, Poets & Writers, and even The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1.
Their authors have read at TED, SXSW, Art Basel—proving that poetry, even in a world saturated with digital noise, still matters.
This is a press that values poetry that fractures and fractures again, that knows the urgency of speaking even as it acknowledges the futility of ever saying exactly what one means.
Get Your Copy
If you believe in poetry that resists, that unsettles, that refuses to conclude—if you are drawn to the tensions between presence and absence, between assertion and negation, between inscription and erasure—then I invite you to experience As Already Happens.
This is not a book that merely exists.
It is a book that happens.
And it is happening now.
If You Like This, Read More
If As Already Happens resonates with you, then I also invite you to explore my previous chapbook, Self-Portraits in a Reddening Sky, published by Cathexis Northwest Press.
That book, too, is an excavation—an attempt to capture the self even as it dissolves, a work obsessed with the way language both creates and destroys identity.
These two books exist in conversation—one circling, the other reaching—both engaged in the same impossible struggle: the attempt to speak in a language that always, already, undoes itself.
Thank you for reading, for engaging, for stepping into this space where meaning flickers, where words stutter and shimmer, where poetry is, as always, already happening.
Pingback: Why Chasing Happiness Is Killing Your Fulfillment (And How to Stop) - Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: Fractured Genius: Why John Berryman Will Break You Open - Dr. Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: When Poetry Refuses You: Why Difficult Art Is a Crucial Teacher - Dr. Samuel Gilpin
Pingback: “Things Happen for a Reason” and Other Lies That Broke Me - Dr. Samuel Gilpin