Casual Takes by Jessica O'Brien (2022)
Casual Takes by Jessica O'Brien (2022)
A collection of thoughts that may or may not be of interest to you.
Casual Takes is a whirlwind collection of sleep thoughts, personal painful mini-revelations, mildly entertaining quips, aphorisms, and tips of feelings strung together into a cohesively contradictory blur that gives importance and exposure to the wildness of the unobserved mind. Written purely as a diary in the phone notes app of the author and only later compiled into a 60-something page chapbook, Casual Takes represents a genuine insight into the intimate pre-analysis truths of a modern poet. Please don’t take it too seriously.
Takes on Casual Takes
“What is Jessica O'Brien's Casual Takes? Is it simply ephemeral sprawl? Or does it reveal the vulnerability of the notes app as a space of outsourced memory; the wonderful strangeness of digital displacement as an enabling mode of reality-as-fantasy? Perhaps it embodies the progression of language that happens so clownishly when we let our hindbrain take hold. There’s so much we learn in this book that evokes outside of the frame—timestamps, the wifi network name, O'Brien's phone battery habits. So much of interior life these days is conducted digitally and yet these pages still hold the phantom touch of the physical body, fingerprints on a cracked phone screen, a kind of confessional truth."
-Trisha Low, Author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books, 2019).