Recovery is Longer in a Dissolving Mind, by Ethan McKnight

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Recovery is Longer in a Dissolving Mind is a chapbook of fractured poems by Ethan McKnight, charting the brutal oscillation between collapse and brief reprieves in a mind on the brink. From the opening seizure-of- thought in “A Glitch in the Nervous System” through the programmed despair of “Scheduled Oblivion,” McKnight’s voice crackles with high-voltage imagery —overclocked processors, bloodied blue-screen commands, and pages burned into ash. These poems dismantle any tidy narrative of “recovery,” instead offering raw fragments that pulse with paranoia, self- destruction, and the stubborn flicker of hope. As the collection unfolds, McKnight moves from frantic breakdown to moments of hard won stillness. In “Dysgraphia,” the writer’s own hands become unstrung instruments; in “This Might Be Enough,” he confronts the strange difficulty of writing when life actually feels good. Interludes of brittle confession—“Editors Made Me Kill Myself,” “I Still and Always Hate You”—sit alongside quieter elegies for relationships, identity, and the self Recovery is Longer in a Dissolving Mind refuses resolution, ending instead on a note of fragile endurance: the silence that follows a long night of glitch-driven panic, and the soft acknowledgment that “maybe it’s just the sound of finally being okay—for a while.”