Eternal Worm by Ezra Chiu is a short, unnervingly intimate pamphlet that works through compressed lyric fragments to examine the textures of dependency, disordered embodiment,...

Eternal Worm by Ezra Chiu is a short, unnervingly intimate pamphlet that works through compressed lyric fragments to examine the textures of dependency, disordered embodiment, and queer attachment. The pamphlet sets its erotic and domestic material against a scriptural frame of abhorred flesh, though the register it actually inhabits is closer to the abject-tender: tapeworms, discharge, ants in water, pear-rot, a microwaved bloomer rolled in sugar in place of brioche. Recurring motifs of overdose, psychosomatic illness, office fluorescence, and transmasc bodily self-examination accumulate into something less like narrative than like a mood held under pressure, where pharmacological excess, eating, and love share the same vocabulary of intake and aftermath. The effect is a pamphlet of unsettling economy, alert to cliché and unafraid of it, in which tenderness is never untangled from damage.