Dylan Fettig appeared in the fortieth installment with three prose poems: Egg, Sort of, The Future of Our Malls, and Unclear on the Concept. The surviving works show a writer drawn to pseudo-scientific explanation, ecological vocabulary, retail decline, media panic, consumer culture, and abrupt surreal causality. Each poem begins with recognizable language from an organized system and steadily bends that language into an impossible world.
Egg, Sort of
Egg, Sort of borrows the tone of technical explanation. Early wood, paraffin, ring structure, ant galleries, frass, fuel, scars, ecology, adolescence, and salesmanship all enter a single fabricated logic. The vocabulary sounds instructional, giving each impossible claim a temporary plausibility.
Fettig’s method depends on authority of tone. The speaker explains bizarre procedures with the calmness of a manual or field guide. Scientific and commercial terms create a surface of expertise while the relationships among them become increasingly strange. That tension produces much of the poem’s humor.
The Future of Our Malls
The Future of Our Malls merges retail language with habitat. Anchor stores, smaller storefronts, shelves, closeout prices, and investment vocabulary coexist with maize, ospreys, talons, roosts, dawn, and dark alcoves. The failing shopping center begins to resemble an ecosystem reorganizing itself after a major environmental change.
This transformation gives the poem a sharp social image. Commercial architecture becomes available to birds and plants as human traffic recedes. The poem treats decline through comic natural history, letting consumer systems and biological systems occupy the same verbal field.
Unclear on the Concept
Unclear on the Concept compresses media suspicion, public accusation, fan mail, last-meal imagery, household logic, Frankenstein, bowling, and a lyrical appeal into one short prose block. The title frames the work through confusion, and the syntax reproduces that confusion by moving rapidly between unrelated cultural registers.
The poem’s humor comes from confidence under pressure. Every phrase behaves as though a coherent explanation exists, and the accumulation of incompatible details makes that confidence increasingly unstable. Media language becomes another system that can be rearranged for comic estrangement.
Systems and jargon
Across all three poems, Fettig repeatedly uses specialized vocabularies as poetic material. Forestry, ecology, retail management, media rhetoric, and consumer language normally classify, explain, measure, and organize the world. His poems use those vocabularies to generate fresh disorder.
This gives the work a natural place within experimental poetry. Technical diction becomes rhythm, jargon becomes imagery, and false explanation becomes a compositional engine. The prose-poem format lets long sentences and compressed paragraphs carry those collisions continuously across the page.
Reading Dylan Fettig
The three surviving poems share a strong interest in systems that almost make sense. Their worlds are governed by rules, procedures, markets, ecologies, and public narratives whose internal logic keeps slipping. That near-coherence gives the surrealism its force.
Within contemporary poetry, Fettig’s archival appearance offers a compact example of prose poetry driven by jargon and absurd causality. Readers exploring modern poetry, poetic forms, and poetry through technical language, environmental imagery, consumer culture, and deadpan humor can approach these three works as a unified experiment in explanatory language creating strange realities.