In revolving sequences that entangle prose and verse, ekphrasis, correspondence, and annotation, Rolling Windows streams encounters of surveillance, digital lust, and epistolary affect amidst fragile media infrastructures, ecological precarity, and the algorithmic composition of the face. Following the speaker on the discontinuous trail of exile and the recombinant zones of encoded networks, the narrative’ s insistence on interval and diversion—source, sample, overdub—is as much a proposal for a migratory ecopoetics as it is a methodology for persons on the move.
summer 2026, from roof books
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Rolling Windows is a succulent, sultry refraction of digital sonics. Campanioni’s poetics do not rupture the fourth wall inasmuch as they bring the poem and reader so close to one another that the veil of longing and exile constellates into a velvet of intimate inquiry. The poet spirals across media and data systems and returns from the outernets of bandwidth to ask, “what’s the difference between a human brain & a hard drive / a hard drive & a tomb.” This is a collection of playful, dexterous care excavating what the datafibers have numbed within the synapses, for “what’s left behind when the body moves, when it collapses inward or elides touch.” Rolling Windows peels away the coldness of what we have inherited from the computer age of colonialism and late-stage capitalism to rewire the body’s sensory-memory. Campanioni is a poet of widening and wilding imagination, who wades into digital fracture to glitch language toward staggering clarity.
— Anthony Cody
Chris Campanioni’s Rolling Windows moves with the intimate urgency of Hervé Guibert and the theoretical precision of John Berger, but with an entirely contemporary slipperiness that belongs to no one but Campanioni himself. Here is a writer who understands that every text is a book of spells, that language passed “mouth to mouth” can transubstantiate reality into something better, stranger, more alive. These pages flicker between presence and absence, between the personal and the political, with the kind of revolutionary ear that Fred Moten would recognize—except this revolution happens quietly in the spaces between looking and being looked at, between message and presence. This is essential reading for anyone who believes that how we see determines how we live.
— Marwa Helal
In Chris Campanioni’s stunning Rolling Windows, an “erotics of indeterminacy” activates formal challenges to the digital nowness of screentime and its obscene elisions of human feeling. This is information flow as noetic ice floe, where the blur becomes the message: the end(s) of the earth seen from an archipelago of VHS tape detritus floating and whirring in the disintegrative climates of disaster. Metaleptic brain tissue is hardwired into a syntax of digital nomenclature, while deictic surges abound in the ether of intercourse and dromomania. The auratic capital of tactility necromances the fossilized remains of flatland romance in the swipes of desire and the wipes of contagion. Here, the mouth is still a vessel of lyric force, while the screen assembles a window-seat view into anthropocentric afterlives. In and against the encroaching waste land of trademarked A.I. Slop, Rolling Windows invites us to return to analog forms of desire: don’t just wipe the screen or swipe the phantom, roll down your window, look out and feel the zephyr on your face, breathe in the battery-flesh of the world.
— Jose-Luis Moctezuma