Review by Sophie Howe

Claire Baglin’s 2025 novella, On the Clock, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, offers a claustrophobic glimpse into the cost of convenience. Over the course of 95 pages, childhood desire for fast food transmutes into the adult necessity of getting a job. Baglin writes with an easy charm in vignettes that oscillate between the perspective of the female protagonist as a child, to her summer job at a fast food restaurant, to her father’s experience of factory labor.

This text follows in a lineage of books like Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl, and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Worker that use the liminal spaces of service jobs to communicate a sense of listlessness and discomfort. The rhythm of Baglin’s writing mimics the pace of production, creating a reading experience riddled with anxiety. Her acute observations balance the urgency of the prose, suggesting that there is wisdom or wry humor to be found even in the trash compressor.

Memory and nostalgia highlight how, as a child, the narrator was conditioned to romanticize work.

The fast food restaurant is the institution where the unnamed protagonist comes of age among all manner of festering injustices. The hidden price of perfectly salted fries, once a road trip luxury, is burnt, blistered, and scarred hands.

The moments where the protagonist is a child trying to make sense of her father’s exhaustion most effectively communicate the impact of chronic manual labor on the body and soul. In every moment that could go unnoticed in a haze of simplicity, Baglin’s keen eye guides the reader to a point of contention:

Work always lingers in the shadow of play.

Like the protagonist in the book, the author’s father works in a factory. This context is not to validate or invalidate Baglin’s authority on the topic, but instead suggest that, if we deem this auto-fiction, it is auto-fiction with skin in the game, coming from a place of care, empathy, and experience. There is a sense of pride in the working-class experience that at times triumphs over exhaustion.

These circumstances also suggest that in the assembly lines of our convenience oriented systems, we are all capable of exploiting each other—even if just “clocking in” to work.

While bleak, On the Clock, doesn’t impart a sense of absolute doom and gloom and defeat. Instead Baglin’s writing is affirming for those who have worked in service industries and illuminating for those who have not. The novel commiserates with the vast majority of us who’ve experienced the depersonalization of fast food and retail experiences.

The choice to keep much of the narrative restricted to the confines of work creates a sense of purposeful disconnect between the reader and the protagonist. This demonstrates how easy it is to be anonymized in the eyes of customers in a service industry role. The constant loops between gruelling shifts and memories of an uncomfortable home life can only be palatable for so long. I found myself wanting reality to become more obscure, and the time jumps to become more jumbled.

Bordering on a descent into the delirious, the mundanity of life prevails. On the Clock reminds readers that with a little tenderness, there can be magic everywhere—although I read it like I too was counting the hours, minutes, seconds before her shift was over, eager to escape the world of oil burns and ice cream machine explosions.

Sophie Howe is a writer based in NYC. She will attend NYU’s Creative Writing MFA starting in September, 2026. Her Instagram is @sophietherat_

Review by Andrew E. Colarusso

My first memory of Kyle Carrero Lopez was at a poetry reading at Taylor & Co. Books. It was a Friday, October 27, 2023 (according to the archive, Instagram.com), and Kyle had been invited to read along with India Lena Gonzalez and Renia White. I’d heard of India and Renia, but Kyle was new to me. I had yet to encounter his work and because he was vouched for by India, I was eager to hear.

On the night of the event, Kyle was finna read some poesía (from what would eventually be Party Line) but it was on his phone. Ever the Cuban-American gentleman and careful not to be misperceived as a sin vergüenza techno-urchin hocking his lingual wares from a demontime exploitation machine (i.e. a smart phone; or, D.E.M. for short), he tucked his phone into a notebook to adopt the more familiar, less devious appearance of a learnéd scholar who actually…ya know…writes things. And, to no one’s surprise and everyone’s delight, it turned out to be a meaty tuck (of the phone).

A first impression is a first impression. And it was a memorable one. From poems excoriating RuPaul’s power-bottom (or agro-top?) affinity for fracking (a poem that, sadly, did not cross the stanchion into Party Line) to more subtle jabs at our national youth poet laureate and her affinity for Sisyphean climbing, the range of his reading ran the gamut of gossip, glam, and glaze—all while preserving an air of sage, secret knowingness. This is, I think, the beauty of both Kyle and his poetry.

That was 2023.

Kyle would again pop up in my feed a year or two later when he entertained a loud, minor beef with another NYC poet, beloved by many, reviled by…just as many. I will not mention their name to avoid any SEO and algorithmic fuzz, but I found it very amusing. Not just because Kyle described this poet as a “sex pest” (my first encounter with this hilarious descriptor) but because Kyle’s full critique of the poet included their unwillingness to engage in any significant political discourse (beyond their own selfish need for pleasure—certainly, we’ll say, someone in violation of Audre Lorde’s economy of reciprocity in “The Erotic as Power”—a sort of pornographer).

Why does any of this prelude matter (and when will I get to the review)?

Pause. Take a deep breath. This matters because I say it matters. Also because it sets the groundwork for my first (and final) impressions of this poet’s debut manuscript. Three years after our first encounter and the protean poems he read from a phone, phone tucked in a book, book couched in our cozy bookstore, have vine-ripened into a vintage that tickles, intrigues, troubles, and invites. And I can assure you, while some of those poems were present in form in 2023, Kyle spent all of that time agonizing over the work, from macro to micro, from superstructure to stanza to space bar. I know because I was fortunate enough to receive an early PDF from Kyle (and the good folks at Graywolf) and would receive another revised copy of the PDF from Kyle like three months before it printed because this foo could not sleep at night knowing I had an outdated copy of his poetry.

The minutiae of a poem really only matters to its maker—and only for the sake of the maker’s vague notion of a future reader (or readership) yet to be (or maybe never) countenanced. When Kyle insisted I read from the revised manuscript, I definitely rolled my eyes…but it was yet another reminder that he cares. He cares deeply about people, about shared experiences, about his responsibility to the reader (and therefore to the future), and most importantly about the craft. He cares enough to hide his phone in a book, to entertain beefs with (at the time) more popular poets over the intersections of aesthetics and politics, and to send me the revised edition of his manuscript barely two months before it went to print. In retrospect, Kyle must’ve been a nightmare for his poor, underpaid editors at Graywolf.

But how fortunate we are for that painstaking attention to language, life, and meaning (and the editors who saw it lovingly through to fruition).

Party Line, as the title suggests, is a polyvalent paean to pleasure and the body politik—because, as each of his poems attest, our pleasures are never without a political dimension.

Segmented into three parts, each divided by a stanchion (the red rope that partitions the eager partygoer from entrance into Xanadu), the collection seems to groove from pre-game (outside), to bottle service (inside), to the morning after (outside, now transformed). Along the way it proves what sacred evolution is to be had in the night, on the dance floor, in embrace, in kinetic reading, in remembering.

My favorite moment in the “pre-game” section of the book is “Statement of Purpose” which flips the professional formality (of such statements as accompany a resume or job application) on its head for an existential explanation of why he’s actually here, like, on this earth.

Surprise! Kyle is here, purposefully, for a good time.

The poem resolves not just that he’s here for a good time—but that he is willing to fight and perhaps die (and certainly haunt in the afters) for the right to live his life as he sees fit. This so encapsulates what’s at the heart of Party Line. Kyle deftly traces pleasure back to its consequential pain and recognizes that, for us especially (black and brown folk), it is never without the specter of socio-political antagonism.

If black joy is resistance, that mode of resistance (which is also our life force) may come at a cost. Even if Kyle is here for an uncomplicated kiki, the structures of white supremacy and global capital invariably act as disruptors. Which returns us to Kyle’s beef with the aforementioned-unmentioned poet. We can rhapsodize over the power of love in our art (i.e. “When the power of love beats the love of power, the world knows peace”) but without a substantive ethos of resistance or the courage necessary to fight for who and what we love, it’s just marketing language, empty speech. That’s not love (not as Audre Lorde teaches us), it’s lust. It’s selfish desire. It’s corn porn.

The people who really love you care to know you. They make room for your human ugliness in their heart and may even care to correct you when you’re out of line (or when you have something in your teeth). Yes, to love universally as Christ loved is also to love thy stranger with as much ferocity as one loves a lover or child or parent. But, again, this is a love that comes from a close understanding of and identification with suffering, pain, loss, absence. That means being vulnerable, acknowledging what threatens us, setting and respecting boundaries—being present and intentional and grounded in the specificity of historical context, need, and desire. Being conflict averse doesn’t make one a lover or pacifist, but it might make one a different sort of p*word. Kyle is not afraid of what conflict will do to his good time because he’s determined to have it, hell or high water. That’s his statement of purpose.

Part two of the collection, the section I am referring to as “bottle service”, begins with an essay (of sorts) titled “Public Policy”. At over ten pages, it is the longest piece in the collection and the most fascinating in its meandering toward conclusion. Not an essay in the typical sense of thesis blah blah, but something a bit different. An essay like a disco ball that spins and refracts light around a four-on-the-floor cadence. Kyle here (re)visits a series of parties, in each exploring with dry humor the beautiful aporia of the gathering. What is gained, what is lost, what is missing is what’s at stake here. How every gathering is simultaneously success and failure—here specifically referencing the prison-industrial complex, the fatal greed of pharmaceutical companies, cold-war politics and the CIA’s many efforts to kill and destroy Cuban agency…

“Bottle service” is more overtly political than the prior “pre-game” section of the collection and leads us into the third and final act which I think of as “the morning after”.

As I’ve framed it, this final section feels most wed to memory, to nostalgia, to an imaginative (queer) longing in the transformative light of a brand new day. It also feels more interior, more projection, culminating in a moment of a magic so full of mystique and fulminant possibility that I had to ask the poet, did that really happen? (I won’t spoil it—but the collection’s final poem made me cry and still makes me bleary—like the most amazing dreams and how they make our waking lives pale in comparison).

This again is part and parcel of Kyle’s power. His poetry is full of a self-assured knowingness, an abiding wisdom, a just-out-of-reach beauty that feels very much of an older generation, one before the internet, one where each of us kept some part of ourself only for ourself and not for public consumption. Kyle’s poetry entreats us in this way.

Party Line is a masterfully written, well-wrought collection from a personality that can quietly and decisively change the temperature of whatever room he enters (or exits).

As a final offering, a recent memory of Kyle that makes me crack up: as I was leaving the Urbane Arts Club, where the Poetry Society of New York hosted Kyle for a pre-release reading from Party Line, I found Kyle in a corner of the beautiful old house kiki’ng with some friends. As I approached for a farewell hug, mid kiki, he held a paperback copy of Christina Cooke’s beautiful coming of age novel Broughtupsy and a little tipsy from tequila, a little giddy after the reading and signing (in which so many of his beloveds showed up and gave him a standing ovation), Kyle said “I thought this said ‘Broughtp*ssy’” and started to laugh at his own misreading—that’s when he noticed me there waiting to say goodbye.

Up until that point I had only witnessed Kyle being dignified, dry in his humor, cool and detached, but locked in, intense, graceful, royal. I had never witnessed him being silly. And to see him have fun, to see him with his guard down and just cracking up at language and misreading—I’ll never forget that as long as I live.

Andrew E. Colarusso is the owner of Taylor & Co. Books. He’s the author of “Pettygod” (Flood Editions, 2026), “Black Body Index” (Book Works UK, 2024), “Hivado” (Flood Editions, 2022) and others. He is from Brooklyn, NY.