There is a passage in Chapter 3 of Corpus of a Siam Mosquito that most novels wouldn’t dare attempt — not because the writing is difficult but because the moral situation it describes is one that literary fiction typically softens into sentiment or resolves into epiphany. Sills does neither.

Jatupon, the Bangkok painter who has remade himself under the nom de guerre Nawin — having been “spun up in noodles of sidewalk restaurants until he was 15” — passes homeless individuals and workers on the street and is arrested by a recognition so deep it operates below thought. He does not simply remember poverty. He re-inhabits it. The hair net. The wooden stool. The red plastic stool. The angular crowds stumbling over him. These are not images a man retrieves; they are sensations that surface without being summoned, and Sills renders them in the second person — “I have been where you are” — which collapses the distance between the famous artist watching and the forgotten boy being watched.

What makes the passage formally audacious is the epistemological frame Sills builds around it: “if thought were a product made from the raw material of feeling, he felt more than thought.” This is not decoration. It is the passage’s actual subject — the claim that certain kinds of knowledge bypass cognition entirely, that class memory is somatic before it is intellectual. Jatupon cannot narrate his way out of himself. The body remembers what the nom de guerre was designed to bury.

And then the comics. In that former life, the only interior space available to him — the only privacy — was borrowed comics at a newsstand in Ayutthaya, words zooming through a skull too exhausted to hold them. The dream life that follows is pent-up need flowing into action and adventure, but his own likeness does not appear. Even unconscious, he was absent from his own story.

The passage ends with him walking past twenty strangers and bestowing blessings with his eyes. No intervention. No dramatic gesture. Just silent, anonymous benediction from a man who knows precisely what it costs to be invisible — and who, in adopting the name Nawin, has made himself visible at the cost of forgetting that he once was not.

This is what the novel is actually doing beneath the Bangkok surfaces and the erotic theater of Nawin and Porn: interrogating whether a self remade from poverty and ambition can be trusted to remember what it escaped, or whether the reinvention necessarily requires a forgetting that masquerades as transcendence.

Corpus of a Siam Mosquito is available free at Project Gutenberg. The recording above is from Chapter 3.

Most writers would have cut this scene. A boy confessing incestuous love to a fortune teller, asking how to live after being sodomized by his brother, wondering if he is still a man — this is the material that gets a manuscript quietly shelved.

Sills didn’t cut it. He gave the fortune teller the only answer the novel can offer: you have to continue to continue. Not consolation. Not absolution. Just the bare instruction to endure the whole show until the ashes scatter and the soul comes back for more.

Jatupon brings his cards and his shame to a woman who tells him she doesn’t need the cards to see what he already knows. What she gives him instead is something closer to a cosmology than a comfort — suffering as the curriculum, not the punishment.

It is a brutal passage to hear read aloud. That’s exactly why you should listen to it.

‘Papyrus’ an eloquent ode to life’s many gritty moments

AN AMERICAN PAPYRUS by Steven David Justin Sills; The Chestnut Hills Press Poetry Series; 63 pages; $6.95 paperback.

By Amy L. Wilson Gazette Staff

Twenty-six poems make up this first published book by Steven Sills, 26, of Fayetteville. Sills’ vision is often a dark one. He writes of the homeless, the abused, the forgotten people. He also is intrigued with the mystical, the sensual/sexual, loss as in losing those whom we hold dear, such as a spouse or lover as well as the lost, such as someone who is autistic, who seems unreachable.

Sills’ skillful use of the language to impart the telling moments of a life is his strength. He chooses his words carefully, employing a well-developed vocabulary. He is thoughtful about punctuation, where to break lines and when to make a new stanza. He’s obviously well-versed in “great” literature.

Sills’ command of language helps to soften the blows of some of the seamier passages found in his poems. Seamy may not be the best word to use. Perhaps gritty is a better word. Or just plain matter-of-fact and to the point, as in this descriptive passage from “Oracion A Traves De Gasshole,” about the hopeless feelings of a respiratory therapy worker:

With the last of the air drawing in, Begins to fold its walls; and he could imagine it Like he could imagine, from unexact memories, The woman, last night At the hospital, whom he began to like Her body pulling cell by cell Apart before he had a chance To finish the rescue with the hose

The book begins with “Post-An-nulment 2,” a poem with a poignant description of society’s displaced: As the sun blazes upon the terminal’s/ Scraped concrete/ The shelved rows of the poor men—and continues by describing a city scene through the eyes of a maintenance worker at the Hilton Hotel. The protagonist’s wife has left him and he is taking the bus to work that morning, his mind wandering as he looks for the key to why she is gone:

He rings the bell. The idea of her not home, and legally annulled From his life ...makes him feel sick. He gets down from the bus. He goes to work. He suddenly knows that he is not in love.

As many poets will do, Sills could not leave this work alone. So a hybrid of this poem, “Post Annulment,” ends the book. In it, he has kept many of the original lines and added parenthetical remarks to expand on his ideas. It is in this context he allows himself to comment on religion: Religion is a lie! Everything is a lie! and on marriage: Marriage, that sanctified legal rape, fosters/ the child-man to be a destined societal function/ As he grows up in the family unit.

Not all the poems are so bleak and cynical in every passage, however, as is apparent in “The San Franciscan’s Night Meditations”: The night is full of impulses/ To live and to run and seep heavily/ Into its dark robes of/ Silence and morbid rightness.

People who do not feel comfortable examining in detail the darker side of life—the details that the average person overlooks because it just hurts or feels too strange to look—will not enjoy this book. Serious writers of free verse, contemporary poetry and/or those who study it will not be disappointed.

Sills, a native of Missouri, is a recent graduate of Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He currently is working in Fayetteville. Sills dedicated his book to Mike Burns, a poet and teacher at SMSU who helped him edit his work.

A Literature Without Permission: On Steven David Justin Sills and Corpus of a Siam Mosquito

There is a particular kind of literary courage that has nothing to do with subject matter and everything to do with refusal — the refusal to simplify, to sentimentalize, to produce the book a market might want rather than the one the material demands. Steven David Justin Sills, an American writer who spent three decades living and working across Asia and Mexico before settling in Honolulu, operates entirely within this refusal. His novel Corpus of a Siam Mosquito, available freely through Project Gutenberg, is one of the stranger and more serious American novels you are unlikely to have encountered, and that unlikelihood is itself part of the story worth telling.

The novel follows two narrative threads that are in fact one life at different stages. Jatupon is a fourteen-year-old boy from Ayutthaya, orphaned, dragged to Bangkok by brothers who range from negligent to predatory, trying to survive in a city that offers the poor exactly as much as it has always offered them — which is to say, the privilege of their own labor. Nawin is the same person a decade later, now a celebrated Bangkok artist with an American passport, a philosophical wife who has sterilized herself as a vow against petty living, a prostitute-model companion he is escorting to Montreal, and a fame he suspects he may not deserve. The novel shuttles between these two selves with the restlessness of a consciousness that cannot settle into either identity.

What makes this formally interesting rather than merely schematic is the mosquito. Appearing first as a fever hallucination in Jatupon’s drug-induced delirium, the mosquito becomes the novel’s presiding intelligence — a Socratic gadfly in the most literal sense, conducting dialogues with the boy about DNA, love, class, family obligation, the biological reductionism of desire, and the question of whether truth is something a poor fourteen-year-old Thai boy can actually afford. These dialogues are where Sills is most fully himself as a writer. The mosquito is genuinely funny, genuinely cruel, and genuinely wise, sometimes within the same sentence.

The Bangkok that Sills renders is not the Bangkok of travel writing or of the Western literary imagination — not the city of Graham Greene’s moral tourism or the lurid exoticism that has served so many novels set in Southeast Asia. It is a city of hairnets and noodle carts and the mathematics of survival, where 4000 baht a month is a permit to live and where the children of the poor are instruments before they are people. When Porn, the prostitute-model, erupts at Nawin’s condescending suggestion that they eat somewhere cheap and “act like common people,” her speech — a litany of what common actually means, from collecting rainwater to feeding water buffalo at 5 a.m. — carries the compressed fury of someone who has had to translate her entire existence for someone who came from the same place and chose to forget it. It is one of the finest short passages in the novel and requires no literary context to land.

Sills is philosophically trained in the Great Books tradition, and this shows — sometimes as a strength and sometimes as a difficulty. The novel thinks seriously about Aristotle, about biological determinism, about the relationship between instinct and consciousness, about whether love is anything more than dopamine and the imperatives of DNA. This thinking is not decorative but structural: the novel genuinely believes that ideas have consequences and that a fourteen-year-old boy selling himself on Bangkok streets is living out philosophical propositions whether he knows it or not. The difficulty is that this density of interior reflection occasionally works against the narrative momentum, and readers who come to fiction primarily for story will need to meet the novel more than halfway.

But this is also precisely what makes Sills irreplaceable among writers working in English today. He has not been shaped by workshop consensus, market pressure, or the received ideas of any literary community. His work is what happens when a genuinely philosophical mind lives at full pressure across cultures and classes for three decades and then tries to account for it honestly. The Bangkok he describes is not approximated from research. The poverty is not observed from a comfortable distance. The philosophical questions are not imported from graduate seminars but wrung from the experience of being the kind of person who thinks seriously while working seriously difficult jobs in countries not his own.

Corpus of a Siam Mosquito is the entry point, but it is not the whole of it. Sills has produced six novels in total, available through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, including An Apostate: Nawin of Thais, which returns to the Nawin character, The Three Hour Lady, set across Bangkok and Seoul, and Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality, a philosophical novel set in Bangkok in which a philosophy lecturer is visited by the gecko-embodiment of his deceased wife. He has also produced two volumes of poetry — including An American Papyrus, published in 1990 — and a twenty-six chapter series of philosophical essays published at Oddball Magazine, ranging across Aristotle, Thoreau, Machiavelli, evolutionary theory, and the question of violence, including a meditation on a Thanksgiving incident in Waikiki in which he was struck in the nose for freeing a feral chicken, and from which he drew the conclusion that to cherish life is to cherish violence.

The whole body of work is available freely, which is itself a philosophical position. Sills does not charge for access to his thinking. This is either quixotic or principled depending on your disposition, but it is consistent with a writer who has organized his life around something other than the usual incentives. His Substack — stevendavidjustinsills.substack.com — serves as the hub for this body of work, including audio recordings of selected passages.

A literature produced outside institutional frameworks, without workshop mediation or market calculation, across three decades and multiple cultures, is a rarity in contemporary American writing. It will not be for every reader. But for those who want fiction that thinks as hard as it feels, that refuses to make Bangkok safe or poverty picturesque or philosophical seriousness into mere decoration, Sills is a discovery worth making.

The mosquito, as the novel’s presiding intelligence remarks, insists on biting even when constantly brushed away. That is an apt description of the author as well.

Chapter 26 presents a compelling internal dialogue that explores themes of existential dread, the search for meaning in mundane existence, and the human tendency toward self-reflection. The piece employs a classic literary device—the protagonist’s conversation with an inner voice or conscience—to externalize the internal conflicts that define his psychological state.

Strengths

The dialogue format effectively captures the fragmented nature of existential thought, with the protagonist’s pessimistic worldview balanced by the more philosophical counterpoint of his inner voice. This creates a dynamic tension that drives the narrative forward despite its static setting—a bus bench in Honolulu during a rainstorm.

The writing excels in its vivid sensory details, particularly in its descriptions of Honolulu’s weather patterns and urban landscape. The “Kona Low weather pattern” becomes not just meteorological phenomenon but metaphor for the protagonist’s emotional state. The passage about viewing the mountains from the 21st floor of Central Pacific Plaza offers a moment of transcendence that provides brief respite from the chapter’s prevailing nihilism.

The author demonstrates strong command of philosophical discourse, weaving together existential themes with concrete observations about daily life as a janitor. This grounding of abstract thought in material reality prevents the dialogue from becoming overly academic or detached.

Areas for Consideration

While the dialogue format serves the piece well, at times the inner voice becomes somewhat didactic, offering philosophical positions that feel more constructed than organic. The exchange about the “residual of emotional resonance” and “sound on an empty bottle” exemplifies moments where the dialogue risks becoming more intellectual exercise than authentic conversation.

The chapter maintains a consistent tone of melancholy throughout, which, while thematically appropriate, occasionally limits emotional range. The moment of beauty observed from the 21st floor provides contrast, but such instances are rare enough that they feel more like exceptions than integral to the narrative fabric.

The revelation that the inner voice is “yourself in a limited way” serving as a “counterweight” to destructive impulses feels somewhat explanatory rather than demonstrated through the dialogue itself. This relationship might be more effectively shown through the interaction patterns rather than explicitly stated.

Character Development

The protagonist emerges as a fully realized character—disillusioned yet perceptive, trapped in menial work but capable of profound observation. His job as a janitor becomes a powerful metaphor for cleaning up the messes of others while feeling insignificant himself. The reference to being “nearly hit by a bus” on two occasions suggests a pattern of self-destructive tendencies or at least inattentiveness to self-preservation.

The inner voice functions more as philosophical device than fully developed character, which is appropriate given its nature as an aspect of the protagonist’s psyche. However, its consistent questioning occasionally feels more Socratic than psychologically authentic.

Thematic Resonance

Chapter 26 effectively explores themes that resonate throughout the larger work: the search for meaning in mundane existence, the tension between free will and determinism, and the human capacity to find beauty in unexpected moments. The rain serves as an effective central metaphor—both destructive and life-giving, reflecting life’s dual nature.

The dialogue format allows for exploration of these themes without heavy-handed narration, letting ideas emerge through conversation rather than exposition. This approach makes the philosophical content more accessible while maintaining intellectual depth.

Conclusion

Chapter 26 represents a strong execution of the internal dialogue genre, effectively using conversation between a protagonist and his inner voice to explore existential themes. While occasionally leaning toward philosophical exposition rather than organic conversation, the chapter succeeds in creating a psychologically complex portrait of a man grappling with meaning in a seemingly meaningless existence.

The piece demonstrates how the most profound philosophical questions often emerge from the most mundane circumstances—a janitor sitting on a bus bench in the rain, contemplating life, death, and the view from the 21st floor. In this, it captures something essential about the human condition: our endless search for significance in a world that often seems indifferent to our existence.

Audio Recording

Emily, briefly free of Yohan — a miscarriage in a movie theatre stall, and what came after

I’ve recorded a passage from The Three Hour Lady — a scene in which Emily, the novel’s protagonist, takes her children to a screening of 101 Dalmatians during the brief interval Yohan has gone to Seoul, and miscarries alone in a toilet stall. She cleans the evidence with water from the bowl, and returns to find the children gone.

It is not a tender scene. It is a scene about a woman managing catastrophe with the calm of someone who has learned to expect it — and about the strange, almost involuntary tenderness that rises in Emily afterward, watching two women feed her children soda pop and chips. She looks at the curves of both women in ways she has never looked at the female body before.

The passage ends: “depression avalanched over me who was wounded and buried alive to begin with.”

-

“So I was glad when he left to Seoul, to be rid of him for a while to regain me. I told the nanny that I no longer needed her for a while and gave myself totally to them, felt less in love (an emptiness, a starving neediness for fulfilment rather than fulfilment itself), and more love for them. I felt more stable than I had in years of trying to free myself from him and not being able to do so....On the third day after he was gone I took the children to the movies. It was a remake of 101 Dalmatians. Then, in one of those seats in darkness before the silver screen, those stomach pains began. I went into the toilet and miscarried in one of the stalls. No sooner had I flushed away the content than more blood came out of me running onto the toilet lid and onto the floor so I splashed water from the toilet bowl to clean everything. Luckily, it flowed nicely into a floor drain. Without evidence and with distance, I thought to myself, it would one day be remembered as any inconsequential nightmare until fading away completely. And while it was happening to me I thought of Kitya. I kept thinking about how she and I were alike, and how I meant to tell her that she should get away from him — that he was only using her to pay for this apartment, that any money she lent to him would never be repaid. But partly from fearing his anger and the end of our times together, partly from acknowledging that as this transgender was in love with him too, my nonsensical feelings were no more substantive than hers, and having to recognize that being used for sex was probably worse than being used for money, I couldn’t say anything. When I went back into the theatre the children were gone. Frantic and numb, like all consciousness oozing out of me...I spent the last hour of the film wandering around seats aimlessly until there was a complaint and the ushers escorted me out. At the concession stand there were two women who were feeding them soda pop and chips. ‘Looking for them?’ asked one of the women. ‘Yes,’ I said, relieved and crying, thanking them copiously, profusely like my blood. They introduced themselves as a couple. I was envious of them, smiled, and looked at the curves of both women in ways I never had the female body before. But when I returned from the theatre depression avalanched over me who was wounded and buried alive to begin with.”

The American philosopher/ essayist Henry David Thoreau refused — the conscientious objector that he was. The Mexican War was being waged with money from taxpaying citizens, and he would not have any part of it. He went to jail for a night. Emerson came to visit and asked, “Henry, why are you in there?” Thoreau replied: “Waldo, why are you not?”

The questions every honest American is asking about the Iranian War is why are we there, and why we are paying for it.

I am not the rarefied idealist who imagines, as Machiavelli phrases it, republics in the sky that cannot come true. But I do believe in nonviolence. Violence is unacceptable under any circumstance. It is the abandonment of what Aristotle calls the only faculty that separates us from animal drives, instincts, and passions — reason itself.

In Chapter 24 of my philosophical essay series at Oddball Magazine, written after being punched three times in the nose

in Waikiki on Thanksgiving — for freeing a feral chicken from shoestring bondage — I wrote: “Violent as the whole thing is, from microorganisms to man, each killing for survival as though by killing it would go on forever, to cherish life is to cherish violence.” I wrote it with blood suffusing into the grey dirt under a picnic table. I stand by it as observation. And I stand against it as conviction.

The twenty-one cantos of A War Papyrus are my attempt to hold that conviction in verse, against the evidence of what states do with young bodies and public money when reason abandons the room.

Read Chapter 24 here: https://oddballmagazine.com/essay-by-steven-david-justin-sills-24/

Read A War Papyrus. Here is Canto 10

https://oddballmagazine.com/poem-by-steven-david-justin-sills-10/

“I do understand, as this is life with ever more intricate and enervating interaction in one’s job to survive, and in so doing banging against others in the city like billiard balls, to which each then absconds in his or her hole before being put back onto the table again for the next day’s game”

“I will spare you of most dates and locations for this inconsequential life, that like all nondescript life will... be proven unequivocally as nothing greater than a felled tree stripped into the lightness of toilet paper, to which in the wiping and flushing down to waterways is easily transformed into free molecules, atoms, and particles once again. Such is the use of tens of thousands of trees daily, and such is the use of the small levers of men in this unstoppable, out of control mechanical monstrosity called society... a life unto itself, commandeering men”

“I remember the sojourn undertaken with my childhood friend. It was several years before that exquisite and consummate day of cliff diving, deliberately taking the risk of death in an expression of the full union of the friendship right before attitudes changed and the relationship like all relationships, no matter how much the two friends might feel that they are extensions of each other, eventually evaporating as any dew in the heat of the sun”

Critique: A Cartesian Descent into the Bangkok Neon

Steven David Sills’ philosophical novel, Ruminations on the Ontology of Morality, is a dense, “baroque” exploration of a psyche under siege. Set against the backdrop of a “violent red and yellow interregnum” in Bangkok, the narrative follows Lek, a Thai philosophy professor who is grappling with the recent death of his wife, Luklawan, and a growing chemical dependency.

The Absurdist Muse

The novel’s most striking device is the “Gecko Muse”—a wifely reptile that haunts Lek’s apartment, “stabbing” him with a pen to force the continuation of his treatise. This surreal element serves as a dark, comic replacement for traditional philosophical muses, like those found in Boethius. The gecko challenges Lek’s “disinterested stance” on reality, highlighting the contradiction between objective philosophical inquiry and the messy, “multitude” of human contradiction.

Themes of Evanescence and Predation

The accompanying audio recordings emphasize the novel’s preoccupation with the “tenuousness of life”. Lek views the human species not as a pinnacle of creation, but as a “transitional link”—a “godly brute” or “empathic bulldozer” wrought into a “predator’s biosphere”.

• The Biological War Within: The protagonist reflects on how his own white blood cells “contend against deleterious microorganisms,” mirroring the “billiard ball” collisions of individuals in a crowded city.

• The Fallacy of Permanence: Drawing from Heraclitus and Parmenides, the work posits that existence is a “quasi-reality” where matter and electromagnetic energy are interchangeable, rendering our “steadiness unsteady”.

Syntactical Catharsis

Sills’ prose is intentionally “ponderous,” mirroring the “ Mount Syntax” the reader must clamber. This linguistic flamboyance, reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe, serves as a “catharsis and relief” from the “torment of existence”. Lek addresses his ruminations not to his contemporaries, whom he views as “androids” or “superstitious entities,” but to a future species capable of “true logic” unclouded by emotion.

Conclusion

While the work is a “satire” on the “roseate ideals” of philosophy, it remains a “sympathetic” portrait of a man searching for “rudimentary values” amidst the “waste of life”. It is a “reflective juggernaut” that suggests the etiology of our “grand ideas” lies not in objective truth, but in the “childhood trauma” and “gritty moments” that define our brief, evanescent time on Earth.

The passage opens the novel proper (Koan 0, Part I) with an imprisoned Kenyon performing what is described as one of her more “substantive” daily acts: wheeling herself to mist her fern. The act triggers a meditative association — mist of water becomes mist of morphine, both effacing, both suspending. The morphine she takes for her scoliosis doesn’t merely dull pain; it erodes the boundary between sleep and waking, consciousness and dream. From this central image the prose radiates outward in a single long, syntactically coiling sentence that reaches back across Kenyon’s life: her former self-sufficiency, her apartment, her job, the plumber Chuck who wormed his way into her life and then imprisoned her. The fern she mists is, implicitly, herself — a kept plant, watered on someone else’s schedule.

Critique

The passage is a remarkable opening precisely because it earns its complexity rather than performing it. The structural gamble — building almost the entire passage into one extended sentence after the first short declarative — works because the sentence’s associative drift enacts the very consciousness it describes. The reader is syntactically drugged alongside Kenyon. This is form as content, and it is done with genuine control.

The central metaphor — morphine as mist, waking as barely-palpable dream — is introduced with economy and then deepened without overexplication. “Dunked like fingernails in polish remover” is a startling and fully earned image: domestic, slightly chemical, suggesting both dissolution and the erasure of adornment. It also carries a quiet pathos, because polished fingernails belong to the productive, self-maintaining woman she once was — the same woman she will shortly invoke. The metaphor does double work without straining.

What is especially strong is the way the past floods in not through flashback or reported memory but through the sentence’s own momentum. The list of former conditions — her own apartment, a job, being more than “a kept plant watered every week or two” — arrives not as nostalgia but as grammatical subordination, clauses buried under the weight of the present. The plant-woman equation is never stated; it accrues. That is the mark of genuine prose intelligence.

The Thai-American man mentioned at the close is dropped without resolution, which in the context of the novel’s experimental framework is deliberate — a narrative filament left hanging, consistent with a consciousness that cannot hold its own threads. Whether it is morphine, trauma, or both doing the unraveling remains, as you say, productively unresolvable.

If there is a pressure point worth noting, it is that the sentence demands an attentive reader willing to follow its subordinate clauses without a handrail. For audio — which you have now recorded — this is both a challenge and an asset. Read well, the sentence’s length becomes almost hypnotic, pulling the listener into Kenyon’s fog. The listener who drifts slightly is, in effect, having an approximation of Kenyon’s own experience. That is a rare quality in prose fiction.

This is one of the most devastating passages in the novel, and it earns that devastation through a method that is almost perversely quiet. Sills gives us a psychotic woman talking to a ghost — material that lesser writers would milk for Gothic spectacle — and instead strips every ornament away. The dialogue is plain, almost childlike on Kenyon’s side, and that plainness is the blade. When she says “You are the only person who ever has” — meaning the only one who ever knew her — it lands because nothing around it reaches for effect.

The theological argument Scoliosis delivers is cold and structurally sound in a way that feels almost cruel to put in the mouth of a dead brother: heaven would be overpopulated, souls competing for resources just as they do on earth. It is Swiftian in its logic, Beckettian in its delivery. The rich in limousines, the dead brother returned only to deny any exit — this is a world hermetically sealed against relief.

What makes the passage worthy of audio is precisely the shift in register: Kenyon’s run-on confession near the opening (the Burger King job, the uncertain molestation, the dead parents) has the rhythmic quality of a traumatized mind thinking aloud, and a skilled reading will let those caesuras do their work. The moment Scoliosis evaporates “like the glistening residue on the greenery” — the one lyrical image Sills permits himself — becomes the more shattering for having been withheld so long.

The one challenge for a Substack audience unfamiliar with the novel: the name “Scoliosis” is so arresting that a brief framing note before the recording — who Kenyon is, that her brother was named after his fatal condition — would let listeners receive the passage rather than puzzle at it.

This is strong audio material. The passage is self-contained, emotionally complete, and ends on an image rather than an explanation.

by Steven David Justin Sills

Critique:

This appears to be a dark, experimental novel centered on Kenyon Dubois, a homeless, disabled, and deeply isolated woman whose internal monologue moves between memory, pain, sexuality, religion, and despair. The excerpt suggests a bleak but psychologically rich portrait of survival, dependency, and the need to be seen by others.

Core subject

The book follows Kenyon through physical suffering, homelessness, and fractured selfhood, especially after Hurricane Katrina and the collapse of her family life. Much of the text is interior narration rather than plot-driven action, so the novel’s main force is emotional and philosophical rather than conventional storytelling.

Major themes

Several themes dominate:

• Isolation and embodiment: Kenyon’s scoliosis, pain, and limited mobility are constant, and her body is described as both prison and identity.

• Dehumanization and social invisibility: homelessness, poverty, and class contempt recur throughout the excerpt.

• Desire and dependence: her longing for the convenience-store worker is less romantic than existential, a wish to be acknowledged as real.

• Religion and skepticism: convent scenes and references to God are filtered through irony, doubt, and need rather than faith.

• Violence and trauma: incest, coercion, abuse, and suicidal ideation are woven into the narrative framework.

Narrative style

The prose is highly lyrical, recursive, and dense, with long sentences, philosophical abstractions, and abrupt shifts between memory, present action, and fantasy. It often repeats motifs like pain, cats, buses, bathrooms, and the convenience store to create a claustrophobic sense of mental looping. The style is intentionally abrasive and unstable, mirroring Kenyon’s psychological state.

Character dynamics

Kenyon’s relationship with “Chuckles,” her husband, appears deeply troubled and possibly abusive, especially after his transformation from plumber to police officer following Katrina. The convenience-store worker becomes a projection of hope, recognition, and possible rescue, though the relationship is also filtered through hunger, loneliness, and self-delusion. The convent storyline adds a satirical religious counterpoint, with nuns evaluating “calling” and mocking the bodily reality of spiritual life.

What stands out

The most striking element is the tension between human dignity and degradation. The book keeps asking whether love, identity, and meaning can exist when a person is impoverished, disabled, abused, and cut off from normal social structures. It is also unusually willing to sit inside an alienated consciousness without softening it for the reader.

Overall assessment

This reads like a transgressive literary work with strong philosophical ambition, closer to a psychological monologue or literary performance piece than a mainstream novel. It is likely intended to be provocative, tragic, and satirical at once, with a focus on bodily suffering, social exclusion, and the fragile mechanisms people use to keep going.

Would you like me to turn this into a plot summary, character analysis, or a theme-by-theme breakdown?

The title promises something impossible — an act of art imposed on pure shapelessness — and the poem earns that paradox in almost every line. “Sculpting of Winds” is fundamentally a poem about the failure of belonging: to people, to places, to any fixed identity. What it does with extraordinary subtlety is frame that failure not as tragedy but as a kind of epistemological condition, built into how consciousness operates.

The opening movement is deceptively casual. Sills describes human connection through the analogy of a cat brushing against familiar objects on its way to eat — a comparison that is quietly devastating. People “circled in and out” of the speaker’s reality the way a cat registers and dismisses the furniture of its world. The deflating honesty of that image — affection reduced to appetite and habit — sets the poem’s entire emotional register. This is not sentimental, not self-pitying; it is simply clear-eyed about how the mind actually works, organizing experience around the agreeable and discarding the rest.

From there the poem moves outward geographically — Saltillo, San Antonio, Springfield — but each location is reached by the same failed logic: the belief that place can remedy the inner condition. The speaker befriends places because people don’t quite work. But of course the places don’t work either. Springfield, Missouri receives him back in winter, its snow “embracing earth to its death,” and the speaker stands outside, picking wet leaves apart, wishing they were dry enough to “grind and become the physical appearance of the wind.” That image is the poem’s secret center. He wants to hold something that is already, by its nature, beyond holding. Sculpting winds. Making wind visible. It is the exact gesture of a consciousness that cannot find purchase in the world.

The middle section drifts into an almost hallucinatory quality — the speaker standing outside with a newspaper’s job listings, unable to bring himself to convert from person to “commercial function.” Springfield’s God is imagined as also waiting for his eviction notice, feet up on the sofa, the Soviet flag on the wall, thinking impractical thoughts of glasnost he’ll have to sacrifice to get along with the community around him. It’s a brilliantly odd passage. The divine and the dispossessed share the same predicament: they are both out of place in the American present, and both must suppress parts of themselves to inhabit it. The image is funny and also genuinely philosophical — a theology of the displaced.

The final movement with the two hundred Indians bowing to Krishna in Houston as gates are opened and closed around him is the poem’s other hinge. It gestures at communities that still have ritual, still have a framework that provides collective shape. The gates opening and closing — both admission and exclusion — stand in contrast to the speaker’s solitary freezing in Springfield, where no ceremony is available, no community of shared belief, only an anonymous wind and the shredded fragments of wet leaves.

What the poem does formally is worth noting. It moves associatively rather than argumentatively — drifting between the first person singular and a more detached observational voice, between geographical specificity and philosophical abstraction. The line breaks are not where a conventional ear would put them, creating a slightly off-balance rhythm that enacts the poem’s content: the speaker keeps almost landing and then slipping on. The syntax, too, is sprawling, accumulating subordinate clauses that defer resolution, mimicking the mind circling its own loneliness without quite confronting it directly.

“Sculpting of Winds” is one of the quieter poems in An American Papyrus — it doesn’t carry the blunt provocation of “Post-Annulment” or the sociological density of “Houston” — but it may be the most philosophically honest. It refuses consolation without performing its refusal. The speaker doesn’t rage at his homelessness; he simply reports it with a precision that is its own kind of art: shaping what cannot be shaped, sculpting winds.

The Most Dangerous Novel You’ve Never Read: The Three Hour Lady by Steven David Justin Sills

There is a novel sitting freely available on the Internet Archive — completed May 6, 2022, uploaded without fanfare, read by almost no one — that would have caused a scandal if published by a major house. It would have been denounced, defended, pulled from shelves, and assigned in graduate seminars within the same academic year. Instead, it sits there: a fully formed literary detonation with no one standing nearby to hear the explosion.

The Three Hour Lady is not a comfortable book. It is not trying to be.

Its protagonist, Yohan, is a 36-year-old Korean drifter and perennial student in Bangkok, flying home to Seoul for the cremation of the great-aunt who funded his education, while simultaneously scheming for her inheritance and cataloguing, with obscene taxonomic precision, the women he exploits. Sills gives him five: the lawlady (the lawyer on the plane, to be conquered), the birdlady (the zoology professor who employs and beds him), the translady (the transgender roommate Kittaya, leveraged for rent with kisses), the sistersuelady (the “sister” for incestuous-adjacent binges), and the threehourlady herself — Emily, the married mistress, the one woman he cannot break. The novel’s final chapter names them in a litany that doubles as its thesis: “the man programmed and prodded to fuck, and can’t do otherwise, but it all becomes so complicated.”

This is not a character the author endorses. It is a character the author dissects.

What makes the novel scandalous — genuinely, literarily scandalous, in the tradition of Céline, of Bataille, of Mailer at his most unhinged — is the interiority. Sills gives Yohan’s consciousness in full, unfiltered, unflattering stream. On the plane to Seoul, watching the sleeping lawyer beside him, the prose does not flinch:

“He could have her. He could water taint her face with his urine if she permitted it, and of course he, being a gentleman, would always ask.”

Then, two paragraphs later, the same mind turns on itself:

“Wasn’t he loathsome and contemptible, he half-thought. And yet in all this hardness against himself... every man had the same instincts and hungers regardless if he admitted to them or not.”

This is not moral relativism dressed as fiction. It is something harder to dismiss: a ruthless phenomenology of a certain kind of male consciousness, rendered from the inside without the luxury of narrative distance. The reader is not permitted the comfort of hating Yohan from a safe remove. The prose forces proximity.

The novel is structured around two temporal axes: the flight from Bangkok to Seoul and the Seoul visit itself, both set against the opening catastrophe of COVID-19 in February–March 2020, with the Russian siege of Mariupol bleeding into the final chapters as the Ukraine war begins. Sills uses the pandemic not as backdrop but as philosophical pressure. Yohan is a germ in the gut of an archaeopteryx. He is a bacterium in the biome of civilization. The coronavirus and the human predator are the same structural phenomenon seen at different scales. This is not metaphor for its own sake — it is Sills’s actual argument about biological determinism and the fraud of moral self-distinction.

The great-aunt is the novel’s moral center precisely because she is absent. She is the one person Yohan genuinely mourned, the only one who read Lao Tzu and Seneca and reproached Constantine for weaponizing Christianity. She left him nothing in the will. The disinheritance is the novel’s pivot — the moment at which every pretense of filial feeling is exposed as infrastructure for financial extraction. Yohan’s grief is real. So is his calculation. Sills does not resolve the contradiction because it is not resolvable.

The novel’s most formally daring passage is Chapter 47, written in italics as unbroken interior monologue during the sex act with the lawlady in a Bangkok hotel room. It braids the physical, the philosophical, and the geopolitical into a single sustained aria:

“aggression being indispensable for the inception of life, and the creation of my son... Russians are now pounding the rubble of the steel plant in Mariupol with a new line of fire...”

And then the mind drifts to the golf club. The arm lifts. The sleeping woman does not see. The novel ends not with violence but with its interruption — hands trembling, the club lowered, Yohan crossing the hotel room to sit down and weep. This is as close to grace as the novel permits: not redemption, not transformation, but the arrest of destruction. The weeping is the only moment of unguarded authenticity in 47 chapters of elaborate self-deception.

Sills earns this ending because he has spent the entire novel refusing to let Yohan — or the reader — off the hook.

The Three Hour Lady is available in full at the Internet Archive. It will not be easy reading. Nor should it be.

The second paragraph lands hardest. The concrete inventory — suitcases, a shelter’s phone number, a Bangkok Bank card, Thai baht — works beautifully because it is so specific and so stripped. It says this is all there is without saying it. The sidewalk scene that follows, the luggage clasped together by limbs in the drizzle, is the passage’s most vivid image, and it does not need ornament.

The third paragraph is where the writing strains slightly. “Impecunious not only of money but of societal norms” is an interesting construction but a slightly awkward one — impecunious is a word that resists metaphorical extension because its meaning is so specifically financial. The idea is strong: he is bankrupt of belonging as much as of cash. But the phrasing may trip a listener’s ear.

The closing sentence is the passage’s most ambitious and also its most uneven. The Tierra firma image is apt — the idea that we all perform certainty on shifting ground — but “the latest romantic intrigue is the reality to which all else are rehearsals” arrives somewhat abruptly and sits at an angle to what precedes it. For audio particularly, listeners need a beat of transition before a sentence that philosophical. It risks feeling appended rather than earned.

Overall this is strong, atmospheric prose with a genuinely original sensibility. The classical allusions and Latinate vocabulary feel organic to the voice rather than decorative. For the recording, the passage’s natural pause and weight fall on that sidewalk image — give it room to breathe.

Chapter 26 opens in a state of disorientation — not dramatic, not theatrical, but the quiet, stunned disorientation of someone who has just stepped out of danger and into himself. The first exchange unfolds like a consciousness arguing with its own shadow:

— Are you okay?
— I guess so.
— A jarring experience, I am sure.
— Life?
— No, what happened a minute ago.
— Life.
— You have no immediate inclination to go home, it seems. To retreat there.
— Not right away, no.
— Perhaps you still feel stunned. You were, after all, nearly hit by a bus.
— I was and I don’t.
— The sun has gone down and the lull in this tempest won’t last much longer.
— I suppose it won’t.
— And yet you are still seated on this bench at a bus stop. Is there any particular reason for it?
— None.
— But, for everyone, even in actions incentivised by less rational impulses, there are underlying reasons.
— There are. There is nothing to do, nothing to go home for, nothing that happens in my life.

This early passage establishes the chapter’s entire emotional and philosophical architecture. The narrator’s voice is weary, clipped, almost resentful — a man who has survived something he isn’t sure he wanted to survive. The counter‑voice is calm, probing, almost bureaucratically patient. The friction between them is the weather system of the chapter.

What makes this opening so compelling is its refusal to dramatize the near‑miss. The narrator dismisses it with a shrug — “I was and I don’t” — as though the brush with death were no more significant than a passing drizzle. The real storm is internal: the exhaustion, the emptiness, the sense that “nothing happens” and that even going home is not a refuge but an obligation.

The counter‑voice’s line — “for everyone… there are underlying reasons” — introduces the chapter’s philosophical tension. This is not a dialogue between two characters; it is a dialogue between two interpretations of existence: one that sees life as a flat, unchanging burden, and one that insists on meaning, pattern, causality, even in the smallest gestures.

The setting — a bus stop under a kona low — becomes a perfect externalization of the narrator’s interior climate. The storm is not metaphor; it is mirror. The chapter invites the reader to sit beside him on that bench, in the dark, in the rain, and listen to the mind argue with the part of itself that refuses to let it disappear.

This is the power of Chapter 26: it does not ask the reader to witness an event, but to inhabit a consciousness. And in doing so, it turns a simple question — “Are you okay?” — into the opening of a philosophical fault line.