Jeremy P. Bushnell is a novelist, writer, teacher, and visual-poetry collaborator whose work moves among fiction, procedural writing, games, collage, and experimental literary form. He teaches writing at Northeastern University and is the author of the novels The Weirdness, The Insides, and Relentless Melt, all published by Melville House.
Beyond fiction, Bushnell works with artist allison anne as Morphic Rooms, creating collage and visual poetry, and helps run Nonmachinable, a publisher and distributor of artist’s books and zines. These practices place procedure, image, book form, and collaborative making inside one literary field.
“Instruction Poem III”
The poem adopts the voice of a game manual. An “IKEA Beauty” must be pursued across difficult terrain using named tools, coded landscapes, expendable enemies, sub-worlds, permanent transformations, and reward tokens.
The flat procedural tone creates much of the humor. Impossible poetic objects receive the same treatment as game mechanics. Desire becomes a quest system, and identity can be worn like equipment.
The instruction format also changes the reader’s role. Commands suggest action, yet the actions belong to an impossible or imagined system. Reading becomes a simulation of participation.
“Instruction Poem VII”
The second poem offers four numbered instructions involving paper, books, sacrifice, divination, pattern recognition, and dialogue with what remains. The procedures combine craft exercise, ritual manual, occult system, and writing prompt.
Numbering gives the poem an appearance of control. Each step promises a sequence, while the actions themselves create uncertainty and strangeness. This tension gives the poem its procedural energy.
The reader encounters ritual as a form of composition. Objects have to be arranged, altered, or interpreted before meaning appears. The poem turns making into a sequence of tests.
Games and literary procedure
Games provide Bushnell with systems of rules, resources, goals, transformations, and consequences. These structures translate easily into experimental writing because a poem can also establish rules and then discover what language does inside them.
Procedural writing generates surprise through limitation. Sara Adams’s found-text constraints and Lauren Beck’s univocalic sequence offer two neighboring examples of rule-governed composition producing unexpected language by different means. Bushnell’s instruction poems make the rule system visible as part of the text.
Game language also brings a distinctive vocabulary of levels, inventory, enemies, rewards, maps, and avatars. Once moved into poetry, these terms become metaphors for desire, identity, effort, and failure.
Fiction and the weird
Bushnell’s novels combine ordinary contemporary life with supernatural systems, occult machinery, comic disruption, and genre transformation. The Weirdness turns literary failure into an apocalyptic bargain; The Insides moves through knives, witches, portals, and urban fantasy; Relentless Melt reimagines 1909 Boston through detective fiction, cosmic horror, and gender identity.
Across these novels, systems shape the characters’ possibilities. Magical bargains, hidden rules, historical settings, and genre expectations create structures through which people have to move. This concern with systems connects the fiction to the instruction poems.
Collage and visual poetry
Morphic Rooms, Bushnell’s collaboration with allison anne, extends his work into visual composition. Collage depends on selection, cutting, placement, scale, and relation. Meaning develops from what appears beside what.
Visual poetry adds another level by treating words as images and images as parts of syntax. Paul Siegell’s concrete and visual poetry provides another approach to typography, spacing, graphic arrangement, and performance on the page. A fragment can function semantically and spatially at once.
Artist’s books and Nonmachinable
Nonmachinable’s focus on artist’s books and zines gives book form a material presence. Paper, binding, size, printing, sequence, and handling become part of the reading experience. Such objects make literary structure tangible.
This publishing activity also situates Bushnell within a community of makers whose work circulates through small editions, independent distribution, and hybrid forms. The book becomes an artistic object as well as a carrier of text.
Instruction, humor, and authority
Instructional language usually assumes expertise and practical usefulness. Bushnell redirects that authority toward strange tasks, fictional systems, and poetic rituals. The confident voice remains intact while the world it describes becomes increasingly improbable.
This mismatch creates humor and also exposes how strongly readers trust procedural form. Numbered steps and imperative verbs can make almost any sequence feel briefly plausible.
Procedural imagination
Across instruction poems, novels, games, collage, and artist’s books, Bushnell repeatedly asks what happens when imagination enters a rule-governed system. The rules create pressure, and the work discovers unexpected outcomes inside that pressure.
His writing belongs within contemporary American poetry and experimental prose where procedure, genre, humor, visual form, and game logic become engines of invention.