“To read Half Out Where is to walk warily through the fields of a helpless present, fated and fateful, where the possible and the magical flatten together under your very feet and the ground becomes rutted with sound that bucks and throws you. These poems and stories are distrustful, and with reason. They tighten and spit. But they haven’t given up on amplitude. They want you to see them, and they want to be seen with you.”

Kate Schapira, author of The Soft Place

“In Joseph Aguilar’s poem films and prose laboratories we farm charged moments. We oscillate inside their oracular machineries. We absorb in the flicker between pages such sonic precision and syntactical grace we are able predict our final five minutes of life.”

Eric Baus, author of Scared Text

“Half Out Where is a complex thing—beautiful, lyrical, and strange—that defies distillation or classification. Aguilar’s book redefines itself with every surprising page. Challenging, tender, and new, it will stay with you long after you finish it. A truly wonderful debut.”

Matthew Kirkpatrick, author of The Exiles

“A sentence is a unit of space and time. Joseph Aguilar knows this, just as he knows that within the unit of the sentence, time and space are malleable aspects subject to magical condensation, wormhole like associations, and reality warping applications of grammar. The sentences in Half Out Where are like rays of light from a dying star that contain the history of an alien world, only the world is our own, and the aliens are us.”

Ben Mirov, author of Hider Roser

Half Out Where was the winning manuscript in the 2013 Caketrain Competition, as judged by Tan Lin.

About the Author

Joseph Aguilar lives in Ohio and teaches at the College of Wooster.

Acknowledgments

Cover image © 2013 Marta Macedo and Danny Ivan. Used by permission. Portions of Half Out Where have previously appeared, sometimes in a slightly different form, in HTMLGiant, Caketrain, Mothers News, Dreamboat, Web Conjunctions, Passages North, Elimae, and The Iowa Review.