Rolling Windows

summer 2026, from roof books
order the book here

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

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

read a conversation with luke rolfes about the book in Laurel Review