Ox

Using mostly two letters and a handful of glyphs, the micropoems in Ryan Ridge’s Ox are more than an experiment in minimalism: They are a story that takes on a life of its own—the life of Ox, a creature of two letters who manages between birth and death to watch porn, take up boxing, become a doctor, go to Hollywood, get in trouble with the FBI, and transcend beyond his own self, all while keeping within a tiny frame of space. Too clever to be strapped into any harness, Ridge’s signature oddball style meets a hybrid margin between poetics and storytelling that both defies and defines genre. The reader is steered into a micro memoir where the visual expanses and spatial mapping are as intricate as any metered verse, repeating its own rhythm until the effect of two small letters becomes nearly hallucinogenic.