toofarwandered by Alex Tretbar. A malfunctioning consciousness proceeds through its fabular bootup protocol as it prepares to enter (or exit) (or continue to exist forever in) hell. A mutatedlanguage-voice looks back on its myriad potholes and occasional flowers with curiosity, hope, and horror. The brain runs out of money but keeps on running anyway. An ur-myth in dense miniature, toofarwandered is a technical document for systemic failure and perpetual self-[un]fashioning.

4.25×5, 30 pages, covers printed letterpress, interiors printed digitally, hand-assembled in an edition of 168.

Recipient of the 2025 1BR/3BATH Chapbook Series, Editor’s Choice.

“Alex Tretbar’s toofarwandered beheads the meadow of the page by resisting the human urge to possess and, in turn, be possessed by language. The ecstasy of this book, for me, comes most obviously from its tremendous inventions for the problems of speaking— specific problems that I had not yet considered. The speaker of toofarwandered alchemizes, through sound, the anxiety of physicality into the real, thumping, bloody organs of a more precise movement. As the techy-metrics of the poems die out, their ghosts sow and haunt a more wild organic word. It makes me feel like the Greek god Janus, looking forward and back on a swatch of grass-turned-sod, night-vision-green, attempting to locate the nowhereness of what it is we ‘do’. Now more than ever, I feel enchanted by Tretbar's vision of poetry as a 'gross harmony'. Like the retina burn of a lunar eclipse, its vulgarity is inseparable from its witness-in-totality.”

—Ellen Boyette, author of Local Virgin of Impression

"to read toofarwandered is to fostivate a massive pleasure salvagely. 
this is an opportunity to really listen to the trumpetleaves 
and experience the harmonic asmr of tallahassean clavierery.  

financially and larynxly speaking, you simply cannot afford not
to graffiti down a commitment to read this chap. 

Tretbar has gifted us this chamber of labyrinths of 
portaling insurgency. and so, you gotta let the rats and moths 
telegram you inside."

-Jenkin Benson, author of are we rocking with this?

Alex Tretbar wrote the chapbooks According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel) and Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep). He works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Recent poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in 128 Lit, Annulet, Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, Grotto, La Lancha, Works & Days, and elsewhere. Alongside UMKC students, alumni, and faculty, he teaches creative writing at Chillicothe Correctional Center, a women’s prison in Missouri.

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Note: Preorders will be shipped at the end of June 2026.