The work announces its own construction and never pretends otherwise. Stage directions sit in plain view — In the aftermath…, I digress momentarily, I… return… — so a reader is watching a document being assembled rather than a poem being composed. That form is a choice, and it suits material gathered during an emergency rather than after one.

The opening prose is the key to everything that follows. A literal earthquake, a zigzag crack over a door, a bedroom floor sunk another quarter inch. Then the attribution: “I think it was due to this seismic event you experienced, and I felt.” Damage to a building becomes the available unit for measuring damage to a person. The conceit could easily have been overworked; instead it goes underground for four sections and surfaces twice more, both times transformed.

Futility opens on a line that improves on second reading. “Futility / is effortless” is the most efficient thing in the document — despair requires nothing, which is exactly its appeal, and the Field Notes later restate it as seduction. What follows is a callback the catalog will recognise: “your life / a leaf racing down a stream.” In “Traveling on the Stream,” written eight weeks earlier, the willow leaf swayed calmly and trembled lightly. Same image, and the tempo has changed completely. Then a single word answers it: “Fight!”

A Personal Exorcism is the document’s engine and its most difficult passage. Written as unpunctuated fury, first person, in a voice that is not the one used elsewhere in the catalog — the speaker is a woman, “the god that calls me Daughter,” an heir to a kingdom. The register mixes spiritual warfare with physiology in a way that shouldn’t work and does: hand-to-hand combat with the devil, and then “every ounce of ATP that drives the mitochondria of my body.” Biochemistry as scripture. Somebody who has thought carefully about what a body is defending it in the only terms available at that moment.

It also supplies the image the rest of the work is built on. The devil’s face ends up on the bottom of a shoe, and the speaker walks on him deliberately, and it hurts, and she doesn’t care.

Across the Distance answers the rage with quiet. Hands on a back, a breath slowing, the world contracted to “two beating / human hearts.” Its closing couplet — “Faith is not comfort— / it is combat” — is the thesis the whole document has been arguing, arriving at the midpoint rather than the end.

Field Notes from the Middle of Battle is the strangest section and the most revealing. The writer stops to extract aphorisms from his own material — “Rage directed at the devil is prayer of the highest form,” “When you’re fighting for air, everything is sacred.” A poet mining his own draft for maxims while the draft is still warm. Whether that belongs in the finished work is arguable; that it shows the process honestly is not.

Finding my Right Shoe is the best writing here and it opens with the document’s most unflinching line: “When your hands look like a corpse’s, I need to step in.” Then the shoe motif returns and does something genuinely unexpected. “Satan’s face fell off your shoe. / A zig-zag crack on the pavement. / Now, someone else has Satan’s face / crushed on the bottom of their left shoe.” Evil is not destroyed. It transfers. Somebody else is carrying it now, which is a bleaker and more interesting theology than victory would have been.

And the crack has moved outdoors — from a wall to a pavement — carrying the earthquake into the street.

Then the title’s meaning arrives. Left shoe for combat, right shoe for dancing. Dance has been this catalog’s constant since the beginning, and here it is what a man goes looking for once the fighting is done. “It might be dancing, / as a witness to the devil / I stepped on with my left.”

“satan is not important” — lowercase, dismissed in four words after four sections of warfare. What matters is stated plainly: “the person, / my Lady, / matters more.”

The closing couplet is deliberately ambiguous. “No one survives an earthquake, / or an exorcism / alone. // Love does.” Love survives alone, or love is what survives. Both readings hold, and the poem gains from refusing to choose.

The coda completes the architecture. The smile arrives “through the new earthquake crack / to a sunrise.” The damage announced in the first sentence has become the aperture. Nothing has been repaired. The building is still cracked and the floor is still sunk. But something is coming through the gap that could not have come through an intact wall.

The architecture is what earns the score. A crack introduced as structural damage in the first sentence returns as a pavement fracture in the fourth section and as the opening the sunrise comes through in the last line. That arc holds across five sections in three different registers, and nothing in between announces it. Readers who notice will find the document considerably better built than its raw surface suggests.

The shoe is the second achievement, and it demonstrates what collaboration actually looks like on the page. The image originates in the exorcism prose, gets restated in the field notes, and is then developed into something neither voice started with — a left shoe for the devil and a right shoe for dancing. An image passing between two hands and coming back changed.

“Futility is effortless” and “When you’re fighting for air, everything is sacred” are the two lines most likely to outlive the document.

Its weaknesses are the visible seams. “I digress momentarily to think of” and “I… return…” are the clumsiest writing here, and they interrupt the work at precisely the point where momentum matters most. The Field Notes section is largely self-summary, restating in aphorism what the preceding prose has already delivered with more force. And the exorcism, whatever its origin, runs long enough that its fury begins to flatten into repetition — the same curse deployed four times where two would land harder.

Raw is the stated intention and rawness has real value here. But this is a document with an excellent structure buried inside an unedited draft, and a reader has to dig for it.