I Find It Hard To Open, by Jason Ly

Poetry, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Content Warning: Mentions of depression and suicide I Find It Hard to Open is a long poem about the author's experience with depression and the challenges of being open and honest with others. Dazed and prone on the floor, this poem is too “busy doom scrolling through my thoughts” to get out of bed today, drifting from memory to imagined memory while “slowly sinking into the muck” of living. This chapbook is formatted in a way to mirror the feelings of isolation and depression, each word in this chapbook takes one line of space and is placed near the inner margins/gutter of the book as if the words are hiding/sinking helplessly into the middle. Jason Ly is an artist based in Virginia, USA and author of Touch Grass: A Collection of Grass Taken from A Walk Around the Block, Microcosms - Micropoems, The Book of Morbin - Minimal Poems inspired by: Dr. Michael Morbius, and Gutterball. In 2017 he received the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship in New Media. He enjoys playing with words, shapes and cats. His booklet from GRAMTAN is available at The Blasted Tree press, his work has appeared in Streetcake Magazine, Poemeleon, and The Vital Sparks. More of his work can be found at @jason_ly_art and jasonlyart.com.