16 Steps for Life

Or, the Gwen Aube Guide to Better Living Through Budget Dentistry

pulp necrosis
Gwen Aube, above/ground (Order it here)
2025

Gwen Aube is a plucky upstart.¹ You don’t generally hear much talk about a poet’s “pluck” in more formal reviews. Reviewers love to say things like, “the poet brings a radical softness to spaces of violence that leavens their inherently traumatic qualities” or “the poet has a writing practice attuned to affect, absurdity, and community struggle” or whatever. If labouring under a strict wordcount, they might settle for simply calling the poet “brave.”² But the “pluck” of Aube’s poetry—that endearing, good-humoured courage of the small carrying on in the shadow of long odds—is a welcome tonic in these times of paralysis and dread. And look, I know plucky is an adjective usually reserved for like, a stocky mutt that wins the tricounty openweight barking contest or whatever, but I promise it isn’t a way for me to say, “Aube technically sucks but in a charming way.” She’s good.

The 16 short prose poems³ that comprise her debut chapbook⁴ pulp necrosis look fairly sober on the page, paragraph-shaped as they are, concerned with dailiness, little capsule reviews of bohemian, mostly bummer days between trips to the dentist’s. It’s easy to misread Aube’s clipped, declarative sentences as having the characteristic flat affect of alt-lit writing, but that’s a consequence of reading it at the wrong tempo. When you speed it up a bit, treating the periods less as full stops than as moments where she taps the brakes while drifting through a tight turn, the poet’s true voice reveals itself:

8.

Tonight a painter complimented my teeth. I pulled my cheek back like a hooked fish—look, they’re rotted to fuck! The painter said the front ones are the only ones that matter. A violinist and I made eyes while she played. I used my 2002 digital camera to take a photo of another person using a digital camera. The painter wants to learn sculpture. The sculptures fall apart when you touch them. The violin sounds unhinged and I clench my thighs. Shuttering, if only as a remembrance of the past. Artefacts populate the screen.

Here's a bit of Aube going off at the last Discordia Review Bonfire show for additional context:

These prose poems don’t barrel along with quite the same ranting, anarchic zip her versier stuff has, but they’re of a piece. Aube’s clearly been brined in the late-millennial blog/podcast style of gonzo comedy (think Chapo, Gawker, Cum Town, VICE), and you can hear it in her deft juggling of hyper-specific cultural references and periodic explosions of vulgarity. That cultural moment’s great contribution to the form has been to popularize the delirious free-associative riffing of a TV writers’ room and to turn it into a vehicle millions of hyperliterate freaks use for everything from vibe-checking interesting strangers to analyzing geopolitics. Entering the Riff Zone with new acquaintances is like building the private language of in-jokes we each once had with our playground friends in fast-forward: competitive yet collaborative, part flirting, part Hacky Sack. Aube’s poems feel like they’re riffing with the reader—you can sense her excitement to tell you about what sounds (repeatedly) like the worst day of a normal person’s life because she trusts you to get it.

8. An office building of cubicles where each cubicle contains a student dentist. It’s cheaper here. “Way cheaper.” Red plastic puck nestled in my mouth like a lover. We have a lot of work to do here. Refrigerant spray and electronic shocks are administered to my worst tooth, which feels neither. He sounds gay but no cocksucker would scrape my gums like this. The sunglasses make me look Floridian. I see six teeth here that need fillings. God is a hexagon of light and from his love I cannot be shielded.

Yes, these poems are emotional (she cries in precisely 25% of them), and they are about being poor, and brokenhearted, and experiencing some rather dehumanizing dental work as a result of this universal-healthcare-having-ass country’s economystic insistence that teeth are not part of The Body, but humour is the bit she uses to drill through to the emotion. Like a lot of funny women, she has a great sense of when she is acting in a way that looks kind of ridiculous and not getting in the way of your seeing it. There’s the part where she ends up crying in a pizzeria after calling her ex a chaser for dating another transwoman; or when, after lecturing a friend about how her self-diagnosed mental disorder is a CIA psyop and then apologizing, she sulkily “put[s] on my Mad Pride hat and stare[s] out the only window I own.” The moments have the emotional tenor of a scene from Fleabag, or Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. But crucially, her self-mockery never curdles into a deeper embarrassment. There’s a much duller version of pulp necrosis out there, perhaps even in Aube’s drafts folder, that really wallows in a despair that no one could really judge her for sinking into.⁵ But in the version we have here at least, she tacks always toward life.

(This next bit’s a lot to freight a little chapbook with, and in all honesty it’s more something I’ve been mulling over as I watch the world darken than it is a direct response to Aube’s writing, but I’m going with it.) I can’t really think of anyone I know under 50 who doesn’t generally feel that we are thoroughly, apocalyptically screwed. The notion of having children, even for those who don’t regard it as an abrogation of their fundamental right to perpetual adolescence, seems almost morally untenable given the state of things, and those who do go through with it defer the decision to the very edge of practical fertility. This sort of self-imposed zero population growth program among the humanities department set and the resultant generation to come of intensely neurotic only children has hair-raising implications for future political organizing, but I also can’t help but see it as a tragic indicator for the human condition. I have no special fondness for children,⁶ but the way we have begun to prune our future family trees like Bonsai bespeaks a curious absolutism: if the moral arc of the universe does not ultimately bend towards justice is life simply not worth living? It grieves me to think the ones I love believe the world is so fallen that something as fundamental as procreation, the very purpose hope and love exist to abet, has been ruled out for them. What an awful judgement to render on ourselves.

I don’t think there is a totalizing solution to the material problems of our time. But as to their existential counterparts, we could do worse than to look to those who have already experienced more than their share of the world’s brutality yet still live with vigour. When I read Gwen Aube’s poetry, I hear someone who has given herself permission to pursue love, delight in strangeness, agitate for her beliefs, and seek after that secret fire within words that real poetry summons, even if she might be playing the holy fool in the process. Someone with real pluck, in other words.

Gwen Aube’s website is here, and her debut full-length collection hits stores in spring of 2026. pulp necrosis is available for order from Ottawa’s above/ground press.

WHY NOT READ ANOTHER CHAPBOOK REVIEW WHILE YOU’RE AT IT…

1. She’s also a pal and a Fellow Traveller, though I’d pretty much formed my opinions on her work before she was either, for what it’s worth.

2. Though as Daniel Jones has taught us, the brave never write poetry.

3. Or I guess the 16 sections of one long prose poem called “pulp necrosis,” but that’ll be so much more annoying to write about throughout this piece, so I’m just going to treat each unit as an individual poem.

4. Debut non-self-published chapbook anyway.

5. Except, of course, in the context of a chapbook review.

6. To paraphrase Junot Diaz (before he got cancelled for, if I recall correctly, being an annoying Dominican guy), “Nobody likes children, that doesn't mean you don't have them.”