Windows 85 by Chris Campanioni Review by Fernando Trujillo Interview by Tiffany Troy

Windows 85 by Chris Campanioni

Review by Fernando Trujillo

Interview by Tiffany Troy

Publisher: Roof Books
Publication Date: November 2024
ISBN: ‎ 979-8-9896652-7-3
Pages: 160

Trick of the Eyes: Review of Chris Campanioni’s Windows 85 by Fernando Trujillo

Windows 85 is a book of grasping, that realizes possession is impossible, but worth the effort anyways. The poet’s method?: a fragmented kaleidoscopic gaze where the speaker(s) seems to demand of themself that they “Better remember everything” (“{prone to domination}”). The speaker(s) of Windows 85 recounts in a poetic fever/fervor where reality is alterable: “always morph / reality / what else is a poem / here for” (“{they paid to have their face removed}”). To “morph / reality”—in his debut collection, Chris Campanioni has crafted an irreducible poetics that does just that.

Windows 85 is a demonstration of intensive attention utilizing the width and brea(d)th of, while pushing at the constraints of, symbol that is language. Early in the collection, in “resource kit,” the speaker says, “the actual / & ordinary cannot equal / in the flesh what the brea(d)th of imagination allows,” then in the next stanza discusses how they want to “attend / to the sensory parts of language / a question of listening / & longing, like: how does language / enter into you, how does language allow you to leave / your body, the willing flesh / & all of its / weaknesses.” This is a perfect preamble to Windows 85. The language Campanioni constructs washes over you and ‘enters the body,’ pushing at the obstacles of language to elicit the depths of imagination in a constantly jarring yet soothing juxtaposing that explores the limitations of body and media.

One of the through lines of this collection is lust. In “{refer to my legs}” the speaker opens: “gaze longingly at this leslie cheung / pinup poster in a buenos aires tango club.” Campanioni shreds erotics into countless pieces of paper and tosses them in a vast scattering throughout the work. Frequently, this is in the context of a connected and digital world: “fibre optic my ankles / & calves laid along the bed” (“{paul klee lives on}”), or “two data points don’t make a trend // two bodies don’t make a double / penetration et cetera” (“{mannequin}”). This collection is a carnival of flesh within that veers from the sexually intimate to the sexually voyeuristic. What the flesh desires, or thinks it desires, is addressed in a thousand shades. And it is punctuated by a cultural lens as varied as the erotics. Campanioni touches on everything from Paul Klee to Vanna White to Leslie Cheung to CNN and Goethe and Althusser. But never is a reference intrusive; one of the collection’s greatest strengths is a brilliant fluency between culture and body. 

Another through line is the “you” of Windows 85, ever-present in the various people that live within it, people that Campanioni manages to make feel like a multifaceted single person. Just as interesting, but more enigmatic than the “you” is the “I” of the speaker(s), who at times seems to exist in an external world of the senses, allowing the reader into their internality only in occasional glimpses: “first we consent / to our own subjugation / trick of the eyes,” Campanioni writes (“{they paid to have their face removed}”), or “…like // goodness I belong to / no one and & no one // should bear me / in their memories // if it is true I am / a person let me / be for myself” (“{witness how time dilates}”).

Though enigmatic, perhaps because of it, the “I” of Windows 85 is its punctum, to borrow a concept from Roland Barthes. “…the most minor gesture / of style and grace as you kept / your knees bent & recast / the mouth of your aperture / how I am overtaken / by the false laughs at parties // limitations of the I / in the photograph” (“{what vanna white sees in her sleep}”). A photograph of a person offers some details about them, but primarily if offers their flesh. In this collection, Campanioni explores flesh in the digital age, and in that context thrusts into its limitations with a rapier. Often, what the speaker(s) of this work speaks around, but does not say, in reference to the “I,” is as interesting as what they do say. Campanioni writes, “retain my cheekbones / on camera evidence…if these eye / lashes could talk…this recalcitrant / hair flip impulse / tattoo my passport // until likeness     skips / a scratch / on the record” (“{this recalcitrant hair flip impulse}”). “likeness” such as in a photograph, as Campanioni has established, is an imperfect vessel; for it to cut across its barriers, even to the small degree of a record skipping, it would need to be tattooed, affixed to flesh to transcend flesh. If “eye / lashes could talk” they’d speak to deepness of personhood not found in mere “likeness.” The body here is not the body of Whitman (“And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” (“I Sing the Body Electric”)), but rather is a kind of projection, limited and limiting.

To speak technically of Windows 85, it should be noted that it is a well-chiseled collection. The project of Windows 85 could easily overwhelm an average poet, but in Campanioni’s hands, the agile enjambment, carefully wrought punctuation, and measured overwhelming-ness of it all culminates in a syntax and diction peering into self as other and world, frequently playful even at its most serious. 

This gets to the title of the collection, Windows 85, which is playful, serious, and apt. Microsoft never released a “Windows 85,” but almost as much as this is a collection of erotics, it is a collection of the digital technologies that inhabit our lives, particularly in terms of modern sexuality. But of course Campanioni does not give us a title with a single meaning. The cover of the collection showcases literal windows, reflective windows. Through his work, we the readers, like the speaker(s), are looking in, but also looking at ourselves. This is a collection that at once stimulates curiosity while demanding self-interrogation as to how we move in the world. 

Reading Windows 85, it seems at times to reside in acceleration. As you near the end, you can’t help but wonder how such a collection will close. Campanioni concludes this exhilarating ride in an unexpected manner through a beautiful untitled prose poem that acts as wall and desire and introspection: “We waited for our oat milk latte. The way we wait for death. What else is there to say? I thought I could be a person” (135). Campanioni could have easily left us in madness or depression or in an acceleration that never ends, but instead, he leaves us in meditation. “…the screen is calm tonight,” the speaker says, “…the screen is calm tonight the screen is calm” (137).

To know this collection you must be comfortable with not knowing. In its reading you will be given everything, and take away nothing but sensation — O, but what a sensation. Chris Campanioni has crafted a book of glimpses that feels like a meshing between C. P. Cavafy’s longing and John Ashbery’s vernacular and veering, in a voice that is evasive and distinct. Windows 85 lingers nowhere, and in lingering nowhere, lingers everywhere.

my image is fleeing again, forgetting to drag the body that bears it: A Conversation with Chris Campanioni about Windows 85

Chris Campanioni’s work on migration and media theory has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary research and a Mellon Foundation fellowship, and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays and Latin American Literature Today. Recent books include a novel named VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a creative nonfiction called north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023), and the poetry collection Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024). He teaches creative writing and media studies at Pace University in New York City.

Chris Campanioni’s galvanizing debut poetry collection Windows 85 begins with the “trinitarian formula”: “before the sky / glows again we rise / to source/ the harvest / careful to unroll our exterior / casting as cables / moisten what remains.” The “windows” in Windows 85 are both Microsoft Windows, a window to Campanioni’s birth year (1985), a descriptor of how each iteration of the Platonian form of a thing permutates by formulae. In a similar vein, Campanioni’s poetry is tangible and virtual, modernist and hedonist, as Ruby Tuesday coexists with passing swarms of Subway cars. I admire how the speaker, listening to Debussy on his headphones, improvises a star, as he scales up and down the enmeshing of subject positions in the poem, as the speaker explores disappearing into the collective “we” and at the subject of attention as the artmaker becomes the object of desire. In the tongue-in-cheek “{your new & selected rolodex of taste}” Campanioni showcases the iterative formulae of his mind, as books of poetry are replaced by our gaming the algorithm for more reactions. If modernist poetry grapples with the crisis of the “I,” Windows 85 looks to meaning to “knowing” oneself and others when description is mistaken for intimacy and when to “lap your orb for divination” does not lead to enlightenment but an acknowledgment of the delimitations of the “I” in the photograph.

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening poem, “trinitarian formula” set up the poems which are to follow? For me, it immediately situates the reader in the space melding reality and virtual reality, the individual versus the collective, and the sexual versus the divine.

Chris Campanioni: Tiffany, this is such a sensitive observation. The poem, in its manuscript form, was originally subtitled “an invocation.” I think of “trinitarian formula” as a kind of opening prayer that both sets up the stakes of the text but also shows you how to play its game.  The enmeshing of subject positions in the poem (“the I & he & you”) is mirrored by that thematic melting—or melding, as you say—of the body and screen, self and multitude … though I don’t want to read them as neat binaries or in opposition to one another. If it’s a prayer, maybe it’s a benediction–a wish to launch or lunch, to take in but also transport, transform. I like your reading, too, of the divine signaled in the poem’s title; a lot of the collection’s poems seem to be haunted by the canon—Those Winter Sundays, This Be the Verse, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Second Coming, Dover Beach … I’m interested in pantomiming this modernist lineage while relocating its cartography through the currents of migration, which is something that maybe connects this atypical book of my “line poetry” with my larger body of writing and research.

TT: I love how you point out how you (as the poet) go beyond neat binaries in this opening poem and the collection overall, because I feel that virtual reality is in fact a simulacrum and a foil of reality and in particular the excesses of our obsessions.

This is your debut poetry collection (congratulations!) and I am wondering if you could speak next about your process in writing and putting them together as a cohesive (even if shapeshifting) whole in Windows 85.

CC: Almost all the poems came together during a twelve-week burst in the summer of 2022. I was conducting research in Europe for a different project but I kept coming back to a poem I’d written just before I left New York City—“cole trickle’s daydream”—I’d sent it to friends before leaving and we were excited about the remarkable shift in form and sensibility; it was so different from the poetry I had been writing, which a lot of folks (stupidly) considered “too smart to be poetry.” I think what they were expressing was maybe this tension between intellectual and lyrical temperatures, a friction that poetry in fact has no desire to reconcile.

I like that you describe the “collection” as more of a shapeshifting assemblage … deciding on the order of the poems once they all were written became a matter of sampling—I was trying to attain rhythmic high points and stage beats or intervals in the text, moving between the formally ordered tercets and couplets and the irregularly structured, open form poems. The last two poems I wrote became bookends for the collection (after the prefatory “trinitarian formula” you referenced)—a self-conscious desire to turn or return to a more radiative mode.

TT: There is so much movement indeed, both within poems and across poems, which hint that we’re moving up and down Koch’s emotional thermometer, with references to Vanna White, a bit of an ars poetica, as well as the speaker thinking of himself as object.

Can you tell us, does your poetry find its form or vice versa? How do you feel having each of the poems that are sandwiched between the bookend poems in {} open up the space for your roving imagination (and vision)?

CC: I love those curly brackets and their surficial (sur-facial?) curvature, which resembles dimples. In computing, they declare start points on behalf of event loops that process user interactions and other events. I like that they bracket the titles of these poems because the titles themselves are permutations of lines in the poems they come from. I think these tactics—iteration, recombination, cutting, grafting—have as much to do with form as the more explicit couplet/tercet stanza organization. I like to think that I think in line breaks, whether or not I am writing things down, but I also believe that line breaks are the language of hyperspace, the language of texting. Probably all the poems—and my writing more generally—originated on iMessage or the Notes app, and I wanted them to retain their metadata, if you will, reinscribing the limitations and possibilities of the media that cradled them. 

That rapid movement you described is partly indebted to the speed in which the poems were written and partly indebted to their aggressive enjambment, but maybe also their absence of punctuation. Besides the gauzy opening summoned by “trinitarian formula” and the repetition of periods in the very telegrammatic “repeat since you want immersion,”  nothing in the book is ever really beginning or ending. Wayne Koestenbaum referred to it as an “erotics/poetics of the in medias res” and I think that the poems in Windows 85 are rooted, if they are rooted anywhere, in the fraught moment of transition: a slippery spatial-temporal  zone of confluence, in which all things, all relations, are capable of coinciding without canceling one another out–a recipe, maybe, for making proliferation into displacement or vice versa.

TT: Yes! There’s a real sense of the line breaks itself particularly when it breaks up a known phrase (like “banana republic,” “day job,” or “garden gnome”) propels the velocity you speak of forward, and I love too how there are verisimilitudes between the medium you’re writing the poems on and the poem itself. There’s the line length, of course, but there’s also the sense of non sequiturs that are in fact deeply connected, a slip, as you call it.

In writing an “erotics/poetics of the in medias res” who inspired you along the way? 

CC: Well, speaking earlier of Wayne, his class on notebooks and other irregular accountings—the first I took as a PhD student—continues to shape my thinking and writing nearly ten years later. There is a generosity and a sense of miscellany and proximity and juxtaposition there that I continue to teach to my own students. You mentioned some references to pop culture earlier. I think the poems of Windows 85 were empowered through a range of cinema—cyberpunk noir like Johnny Mnemonic, 80s sword and sorcery epics like Conan the Destroyer, early 90s popcorn movies like Days of Thunder and Tango and Cash, “straight-to-video” releases that maybe no one else still watches, like Prayer of the Rollerboys, and Hong Kong New Wave—especially the work of Wong Kar Wai, whose Happy Together is referenced early in the collection. Vanna White, as you noted, is conjured. So is Taylor Swift. So is Melania Trump. So is Prince Harry. Ecco the Dolphin, Paul Walker, Jill Biden, and so on and so forth.

I want to play these voices—this theater of bodies—together with Barthes, Balzac, Althusser, Glissant, Goethe, Klee, Marx, Debussy, Dante, Duchamp … which is not just about a mode of holding attention and complexity, but really opening up “the poetic,” and reminding readers that what a poem is, what it looks and sounds like, what it can do and what it carries, has always been elastic; this is poetry’s power.

TT: In that vein, is that why you chose to name the collection Windows 85? There’s definitely a sense of nostalgia and a moving towards a future beyond it: and in some ways you’re doing (from my perspective) what the cubists did to painting but in lyric form, which harks back to the comment about your poems being “too smart.” Perhaps in this response you can also speak to how time functions in the collection.

CC: Yeah! I love this double gaze you mention … it reminds me of an early moment from the poem “spilled mezcal > spilled milk”: we could circle/time in ink angel/of history head/turned always toward new/jersey … Like Walter Benjamin, and many other people, I’ve long been entranced by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. This sense of being carried away into the future while looking, at the same time, at the past–their intrinsic coinciding, or sequential mutability. Anyway, 1985 was the year I was born so I like to think that our normalized ways of looking through/into/out of and with windows began at my birth. I didn’t know this while I was writing the collection and it didn’t dawn on me until after the book was published, but Windows did in fact originate in 1985, with the glitch-ridden Windows 1.0, which was released by Microsoft in the US a few months after I was born. So your comments about time and its connections with perspective are really prescient; I think of windows as a generator of sight/site; I remember reading somewhere–though I’ve misplaced the source–that the operating system was named “Windows” because of the idea of it being a portal into a virtual world. Cubism breaks down shapes to reveal new surfaces, right? Reassembling objects from different angles or melting the space between them to carve out other realities. Poetry, as you suggested, can do the same, with attention to the ways in which meticulous lineation can ventriloquize the “always on” experience of an assumed simultaneity brought by new media. What is being modulated here is not just time but our ways of inhabiting or acknowledging space. 

TT: It’s amazing how with each response you show to us the layers and layering in your work. In the spirit of Windows as hegemon and a portal, a window to a deeply personal self-hood and a world plus ultra on the clouds, I’m borrowing this from Ruben Quesada’s questions to poets: if you could go back in time and give tips to your younger writing self, what would it be? 

CC: Oh, I love that Ruben might join us here, even momentarily. I think I’d remind my younger self of the importance of patience –I am a lot of things, in a lot of different spaces, but “patient” is neither here nor there. Each book I write teaches me about itself, gradually revealing aspects that its author could maybe only feel at various moments of the writing, absent the violence brought by identification. This occurs for every writer, I think, whenever we encounter our work again as a reader. The generosity of reading, the critical intimacy of editing, the privilege of publication–all of these exchanges and interactions require their own kind of fluency, and I still feel both out of place and at odds with prevailing practices and behaviors within our literary ecosystem. I would also tell my younger self to keep resisting the impulse of legibility, to avoid the trap of sacrificing the book for a book deal. 

TT: In closing, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with your readers of the world? It can be anything really, but I as the reader would love to hear a bit about your take on hybridity/ writing across genres, which I sense you do quite a lot in your impressive oeuvre as a writer.

CC: I’ve been given the incredibly rare treasure of having four books in four different genres publishing this academic calendar: in addition to Windows 85, there’ll be a novel called VHS launching in March from CLASH Books, a creative nonfiction called north by north/west launching in May from West Virginia University Press, and a monograph that theorizes literature and art produced through experiences of migration, detention, and exile called Drift Net launching in July from Lever Press. Throughout all these different projects, a common throughline is my desire to continue to engage in the practice of self-translation. It’s funny, I was just talking about this, like three days ago, during a virtual class visit to Jennifer Maritza McCauley’s energetic multi-genre workshop at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In my own classes, we begin with an assignment called the “Mixtape” and end the semester with a “Remix” assignment, in which students are invited to radically reenvision the form of one of their earlier texts. I think seeing a text as nothing but a copy–the reminder that no text is original, but only, as Barthes has said, a tissue of citations–informs so much cross-genre writing, as well as the growing field of what folks call “creative critical writing” in the academy. And without being prescriptive–or without wanting to be prescriptive–I think a marker of this hybrid text is the desire to give back to the reader the ingredients of writing it. What I mean is the moment of composition—the conditions through which writing and thinking arise in that moment and because of that moment. So “writing across genres” has meant empowering theory and process alongside the lyrical. One of Jennifer’s students, remarking on “Bloodsport” (from VHS), which The Adroit Journal recently nominated for the annual Best of the Net anthology, described how the reader is never really sure when and where things are happening, because the time of the speaker is not always aligned with the time of the narrative, and because the setting shifts so often, though the events that occur in these different times and spaces is so clear. And I like thinking about entertaining–and intensifying–that generative blur, which comes off or comes out only through the careful application of clarity.

Chris Campanioni’s work on migration and media theory has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary research and a Mellon Foundation fellowship, and his writing has received the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Best American Essays and Latin American Literature Today. Recent books include a novel named VHS (CLASH Books, 2025), a creative nonfiction called north by north/west (West Virginia University Press, 2025), a notebook titled A and B and Also Nothing (Unbound Edition, 2023), and the poetry collection Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024). He teaches creative writing and media studies at Pace University in New York City.

Fernando Trujillo’s poetry has appeared with The Cortland Review, MQR (Goldstein Prize in Poetry), Passages North, Poetry Daily, and other publications. His chapbook, 6 Lineage Poems, winner of the 2024 Robert Phillips Chapbook prize, is currently available from Texas Review Press. He can be found at instagram.com/blackberryblackberryetc

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamond & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, Assistant Poetry Editor at Asymptote, and Co-Editor of Matter.

7 May 2025