that word doesn't belong there

gary lutz has words by the balls. he manipulates them, rearranges, rapes. i am in love.

i discovered lutz this year at a meeting for writing majors at my university. he is socially awkward. his face perches, his limbs slump. but this posture works for him. he wears black and sometimes a wedding ring. he cuts his pickles with a knife and fork. his office is covered in unorganized heaps of paper and he uses commas correctly. his short fiction makes me want to throw couches:

People, in truth, had got the wrong ideas about me - that I responded well to cosmetics . . . that my teeth had been sewn tight into my gums with thick black thread.

lutz's story aren't page turners. they are based around words being inevitable to one another within a sentence. he proves that the following word cannot exist without the preceding word. my head freezes on sentences when i read his stories. i study syntax, connotation, syllable stresses, vowel placement, font size, leading.

his characters are not memorable. they have no names, no description beyond their eccentric psychological oddities. but in the end, you want more. you want all those sentences back and in a different order. you want those confusing moments when you walked away from the sane part of your brain. you want sisters with hair swells. you want a relapse.