Mutually Assured Destruction by tommy wyatt blake
Mutually Assured Destruction by tommy wyatt blake
pre-order, will ship by the beginning of November
2025//limited edition 60 copies//6.5×8, 46 pages
“I wrote this chapbook in a 24-to-48 hour period when I was hospitalized in the psychiatric unit for a Bipolar I manic/psychotic episode. At the same time, I was rereading H.G. Wells’ book, The Time Machine and thinking about Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk album.”
tommy wyatt blake (he/they) is the jester of popular culture and poet laureate of timefuckery. he's the author of FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT! (Troublemaker Firestarter, 2026); DITCHLAPSE / [REALLY AFRAID] (Querencia Press, 2024); So, Who's Courage? (Bullshit Lit., 2023); Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen (fifth wheel press, 2022); and others. they are currently synthesizing digital archives, space voids, and confines of the body.
BLURBS
In the background of technology, society, and horror, tommy wyatt blake explores the Self as a form of love and destruction. Each piece subverts norms previously placed on tommy, whether that be through form, content, description, or more. MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION blends the candid, yet raw description of mania with the beauty of the self as horror, all in an effort to make sense of the world as his. With pointed lines like "simmer down, why so morbid? your body’s a waterpunctured machine with an apparition sheen," blake elucidates his self with a blend of humor and morbidity, almost as the two mimic each other. Through MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION, tommy wyatt blake exposes himself for the world to see, forcing readers to stay watching the story of his life.
—arushi (aera) rege, author of exit wound (no point of entry), twin exit wound (twin points of entry), & BROWN GIRL EPIPHANY, EIC of ink & ivy lit mag and Bus Talk
The short, incisive, and often surreal poems of this text crackle with blake's characteristic subjectivity. Animated by the joy of synaesthesia and possible/alternate realities, MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION is a delight to read, and will have everyone from the poetry-curious to seasoned readers furiously annotating every page and dreaming of blake's otherworldly visions.
—mk zariel, trans poet and anarchist
Reading tommy wyatt blake’s MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION feels like stumbling upon the notes of a time-and-self scientist from a biohacked future, who has accidentally cloned Schrödinger’s cat using a remote viewing technique learned from religious myth. The compound neologisms that blake’s readers know and love are incisive tools for probing beyond the curtain of subjectivity; the body’s noun is “dayveil,” “lightfusion,” and “diesurrogacy,” while its condition is “humanruined,” “toyhacked,” and “truthpatched.” blake’s speaker aspires to answer the question of the verb: “see how my Form shudderfogs between life and death?”
—D.W. Baker, editor of GOD/CORPSE: writing on the bipolar body