van laer

Beginning with a heroic couplet found inside a fortune cookie and ending with the novella’s titular poem, How to Adjust to the Dark is both a collection of poetry and self-examination by a poet, Charlotte, looking back on her early twenties after an extended period of writer’s block. Explicating the romantic relationships, personal history, and struggles embedded in each of her poems, Charlotte gradually uncovers the many versions of herself she has inhabited and the traumas woven into her beliefs about who she was as a writer and person at each critical point in time. A hybrid of prose, poetry, and theory in the vein of Bluets and Leaving the Atocha Station, How to Adjust to the Dark is a writer’s frank, extended examination of the idea that falling in love and making art have to hurt to be good, and the work it takes to disentangle oneself from this notion in order to grow into who it is we want to be, what we wish to write about, and how we choose to make a life.