"For all this time, all I’ve ever wanted, thrived for, prayed to achieve, was one goal—win your heart."

The narrator of this multimedia collection of poetry, short stories, prose poems, photographs, and paintings analyzes love in its many incarnations. The narrator's strongest and purest emotion is his love for his tween daughter. But as their relationship grows strained, he reflects on the various forms of love in his life—parental, romantic, platonic—and the creation and dissolution of all these relationships. The tone of the writing changes with the passage of the seasons. For example, the writings in the "Spring" section are mostly light and hopeful. By "Winter," the narrator's struggles with mental illness and substance abuse drive the story to deeper, darker themes. A mix of incisive wit and silly humor help lighten the tone throughout, but the overarching focus of this text is that of a deeply feeling person trying to reconcile loving with not being loved.

Fans of zine culture will embrace the book's layout, with pensive poems just a page turn away from psychedelic digital collages. Photographs seem to repeat themselves but change slightly with each repetition, as when a picture of a camera morphs over the course of the book into burning rubble. With a lesser writer, the contrasts of words, images, and subject matter could feel disjointed, but C.O.B. deftly handles these jumps and leaves readers anticipating the next turn with excitement. Rather than coming across as confusing or frustrating, the sometimes surreal leaps in tone or subject matter are masterful enough to recall Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. Indeed, the writing evokes other Beat writers like Kerouac or Burroughs, bringing their style into the twenty-first century. Love and loss are topics that could easily devolve into sentimentality, but C.O.B.'s work gives readers a fresh perspective into these most poignant of human emotions.

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