Demanding the Room by Dylan Angell

Today, I sat quite close to the window while the sun slowly slid out of view. It had been some time since I allowed myself to enjoy watching the sky twitch with its exit colors.

A bird or a neighbor might have seen me press my face to the glass like a child, but I have grown so used to going unseen that I no longer imagine how I might appear to others.

Demanding the Room is a subtly sweeping collection of sixty-two poems and prose poems by Dylan Angell, illustrated with drawings and oil-on-canvas paintings by Mark He.

In Demanding the Room, Dylan Angell traverses and roams liminal spaces: between mind and room, room and adjacent room, home and yard, yard and neighbors’ yards, surveilled neighborhood and outskirts, outskirts and boondocks, and, throughout, where he was (a lingering Mexico City) and where he is (his native Durham, North Carolina).

The collection is also hidrotic throughout. Bodies of water abound, surging, upchucking jetsam, swirling houses off their foundations, accepting sinking saints.

Demanding the Room is illustrated with drawings and paintings by artist Mark He, who has a knack for conveying through the visual: the frizzle of powerlines strung haphazardly; the perpetual stretching of vines repossessing buildings; the push of water eternal.