SubOptimal

By Avery Arbegast

This book is not interested in saving you.

It moves through fear, control, pleasure, and erosion with the understanding that none of them resolve into clarity. What it records instead are moments of contact: the body reacting before thought, the mind inventorying its limits, the quiet competence required to continue without believing it will lead anywhere better. These poems do not explain life. They observe it deteriorating, adjusting, and persisting anyway.

The work is structured, but not comforting. Fear is treated as intelligence rather than weakness. Pleasure appears briefly, without promise. Control is temporary, often illusory. Endings arrive without ceremony and do not redeem what came before them. The language is restrained, deliberate, and unsparing, drawing more from philosophical and classical traditions than from modern confessional poetry.

This is a book for readers who do not want reassurance, metaphors for healing, or lessons disguised as art. It does not offer hope as a conclusion or despair as spectacle. It assumes you are capable of looking directly at mortality, attrition, and the ordinary violence of time without being managed through them.

Nothing here will improve you.

Nothing here is meant to.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GJJ9KWXY
• ISBN13: 9798233689604
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Avery Arbegast
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"