Regarding “The Difficult Poem,” Charles Bernstein has written that it is “unsuitable for use in love letters.” Judah Rubin’s Phrenologue is just such a “difficult” poem, frustrating our attempts to discern the poem’s summary sense, on the scale of the sentence and beyond.

By way of explanation, the author writes, “Phrenologue: to extent – of interior – space – in a drift, spatialized timing with-in a field of language – without – dimensional apprehension belies – philologic – all – biologic / historical – such that – heat – propensity of measurement – fuses where the thorax and abdomen meet – of the head removed, or not yet come into measurement and of movement within the extra-spacial – motion, callibrated intersection of the applicant field of decay.”