Olivia Muenz’s new chapbook, Where Was I Again, explores what it means to exist in a world that only values humans for their ability to increase profit, disregarding our humanity and erasing evidence of inability and disabilities out of fear that these realities could be—oh no—contagious. Muenz’s work converses with a late-capitalist machine that doesn’t care that our bodies and our sense of self are breaking down. Her poems stand as a manifesto against the belief that our worth is based on our rate of production and insist that we must derive meaning from life and develop self-worth by continuing to practice an inevitably-failing act of self-renewal and by questioning our realities.

The tone in “Preface” is personal and conversational, and the sense of time feels immediate and off-kilter; the two in combination keep the reader off-balance, causing my breath to become uneven while reading: “Here is my brain. It is writing this. For you. In Times New/Roman. To make us both feel. Better.” The warmth of the tone mixed with the arrhythmic beat of phrases feels comforting and strange. There is also an old reference to the “this is your brain on drugs” PSA that I used to see on MTV in which some raw eggs are smashed by a teen with a frying pan. The drugs that the speaker refers to are “perfectly legal,” yet the state of the speaker’s mind sounds like it is still trying to grasp for a sense of normalcy and stability. The scope of this book begins small and personal, then it spans to global before becoming small again; I am asked to experience how the earth is “Rotating on its axis and so. Is this room. And so are you,” leaving me feeling whiplash and the realization that the private is a part of the world at large. In multiple ways, I can’t help but resonate with the private self that turns into a spectacle for others to witness: I am a millennial who was trained to believe that if my thoughts, pictures, and actions were not posted for others to see on Myspace, Facebook, and Instagram, then I might as well be nonexistent. And, as a writer who (compulsively?) writes about personal experiences and dissects root causes of my discomfort or pain for others to read, there is a bisected release in having my life witnessed: the existence of a “stage” for my experience comforts me, reminds me that I am not alone, but I am also aghast at the thought of spilling my feelings onto the screen or page where others will witness my earnest, failed attempts at explicating what life means to me. Muenz’s request is that we feel how this planet is “rotating on its axis.” When I realize that I, too, am rotating with it, I feel simultaneously small and monumental, filled with possibility and power.

The second section, “I’m here,” is declarative and insistent, again demonstrating the interchangeability of the personal for the global or relatable. In the beginning of the book, the speaker’s brain was offered on a tray, and now, the whole world is offered to us to consider: “Here is the world. We are in this together. The/body pulls. In towards itself and towards all of us.” Then, the sense of unity in “us” is taken under a microscope so that we realize how relatable and annoying life is when the speaker reminds us, “Don’t forget. To call the pharmacy again.” In a minute parallel of my own life, the older I grow, the more I realize and notice that my body and my brain fail me, forcing me to rely on my doctor more. I grew up uninsured and, fortunately, did not develop long-term health issues until later in life, which left me unfamiliar with navigating the self-propagating maze that is the American healthcare system. When I eventually developed thyroid and anxiety issues, mitigating illnesses with prescription medicine was a relief that was addled by reminders of how unaccustomed I was to all of it (something as simple as not knowing how to refill a prescription). For me, to exist in this world means to feel the heaviness of seemingly-facetious philosophical musings such as “how do we exist in this world, together?” as well as having to mind the little glitches of a system I don’t quite understand, like remembering to call the pharmacy because my butterfly-shaped thyroid is forever broken and my brain is rattled indefinitely by a childhood of trauma and predisposed by an anxious mother and depressive father. With time, my life and health have grown more complicated, and whether I know how to persist or not, I keep going, and so do Muenz’s poems.

The mundane, average experience of recalling unexpected memories turns beautiful and odd when the speaker says:

Here is that memory I wasn’t looking for. You

brought it back all of a sudden in a little tote bag.

I had forgotten all about it and now here it is.

What a surprise. Did you bring a gift receipt.

Through the juxtaposition of the relatable feeling of being flooded by an unwanted memory and the humorous and frustrating experience of having to fish out that damned gift receipt at the bottom of a tote bag, I long with the speaker to feel like we can be freed from our own unwanted feelings. I desire to escape it by the only way we know how—our late-capitalist world allowing us to return our unwanted feelings and memories as long as it came attached with a gift receipt!

And in the final section, entitled “But not,” the speaker is still trying to play by the rules of the outside world and failing gloriously, going down in flames:

But it’s not like that. Let me try to explain. Let me

give you a real out. Have you ever punctured

something tiptop. Have you ever forgotten. Your

shoes. Have you ever spun around real fast and

become. A water balloon. Are you following all

of this.

While reading, it feels as though I am listening with my ear on the wall for any scrap of information about how to escape this manmade trap, this system that makes me base my worth and value on my ability to produce money on the behalf of entities bigger than me. I do, indeed, remember forgetting my shoes, or rather, forgetting to wear the same pair and clopping around the streets with two similar-enough but mismatched shoes from the sheer exhaustion of existing. I have “spun around real fast” and became disoriented enough that up becomes down; I may as well have become as sensitive and weighty as a “water balloon.” As I read, I try to keep up and am unsure if I’m “following all of this,” but I like the way I feel.

The speaker is weighed down and mired by the realities of the world and exhausted by trying to play with its rules: “But I am glued. To my handcar. My partner untied/his shoes. He got out. I pump myself one handed. I use all my weight. I am so tired.” The speaker is trying to make sense of and divest from the world that disregards their state of well-being or lack thereof. We are all clamoring to claw our way out, “A real out,” and unable. We rely on one another and long to be productive citizens, but, according to the speaker, it all feels rigged. While reading this book, the entire structure starts to feel like an MLM, a “girlboss” scam that we cannot escape. This book’s stilted enjambments, the way we are forced to reconcile the recognizable pains of living without being offered a solution—all funnel into an inescapable and frustrating sense of self-awareness.

In Olivia Muenz’s Where Was I Again, the mental state and the tiredness of the speaker’s body are products of the faulty world around them, and the only solutions offered to them are those from a society that profits from this malaise. The speaker continues to attempt to act normal, like they are “fitting in” and “Up to my ears in normal. I am business. As/usual. I am nothing. To see here.” I am cosplaying an adult woman in my blazer and college degrees that confirm my adultness, but I am actually clueless. But, there is so much to see here, to witness how to survive this rat-eat-pizza or rat-eat-rat world, and much of that begins by observing those around us, by watching the forces of life and death that ground our bits to bones until we cry “mercy.”

And we try to persist anyway.