Booked Bilinguality

Alex Henry

words like people may
be used or users too*.
your bigs, your smalls,
your elephantines and bijoux.
     subtle,
     subminimal,
     sublime.
take the larger than life
locution; celebrity heaped in stockpiles of
reserve. starlike for an
asterisk. the common man’s
preeminence; trailer parks of articles and
prose. the ex-con back in precinct
cuffed to prefix or conjunction still are people*.
     through&throux.


Rooted in the study of English and Government as an undergraduate in the heart of our nation's capitol, Alex C. Henry’s starry-eyed dreams of a life in politics crashed and burned with countless other, like-minded interns in the white marble halls of the House of Representatives. Rekindled in the former field, Henry's first, piercing foray into the sphere of the written word resulted in an unusual debut piece: Cataphora: A Novel of Poesies Real & Imagined, which all at once endeavored to break the mold of mainstream fiction. Succeeding to a much smaller end, this 80,000 word "experiment" quickly earned top prize in a competition of the Arts at Georgetown University. Since then, Henry's writing has taken him across the board of artistic expression, from stage plays never to see the light of day, to gut-wrenchingly succinct grocery lists, published to the broad readership of a refrigerator door. Today, you may find him typing away his youth at any old [comfortably underpopulated] coffee house on Long Island, New York, with an eye (however bloodshot) towards the next great American Novel — his one, final plea to the expansion of the human condition — thank you, Congress.