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The Audacity Issue / July 18, 2026
Storm Warning, Borrowed Time, Deliberate Error, No Thanks, Nothing Saved
Today's issue sponsored by The Flyover.
Welcome to The Audacity Issue, where boldness gets examined up close, from the page to the podium to the home during a storm. Stick around and you will see exactly what daring costs, and why it is worth paying anyway.
Today's poem, "Take Shelter Immediately," pours a Texas storm memory into fourteen lines of a Shakespearean sonnet. Keep reading, and the rest of the issue will show you exactly what that kind of nerve costs.
Boldly,
Jason
jasonzguest.com
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Featured Poem
A Texas storm poured into fourteen relentless lines.
Echoes
A poet given a second life spent it loud.
Devices
Catachresis dares language to fail and win anyway.
Testaments
Fourteen rejections became the best page in the book.
Creative Spotlight
It looks like a camera and dares to disobey.
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Featured Poem
Take Shelter Immediately
Take Shelter Immediately
By Jason Z Guest
The warning sirens crow, this morning’s rooster,
the wail circling like our airport light.
Heads turn in a small town, youth sports, boosters,
their eyes drawn to sweltering skies in fright.
Mom works the kitchen, her sweetest of rooms,
a chocolate icebox pie sits with settled dome,
I dart past bowls, cream-covered whisks, and spoons
to a window, through the door, eyes above home.
A quiet sets in until raindrops come knocking,
debris chases songbirds throughout the yard.
One mile away, my town takes a whipping,
strewn remains of homes the funnel leaves scarred.
Clearly not best, this uninvited guest,
leaves us strangely thankful, weary, and at rest.
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Echoes
A Second Heart, A Louder Life
On this day in 1955, Dean Young was born in Columbia, Pennsylvania, though it was Texas that eventually claimed him. He taught for decades at the University of Texas at Austin, held the William Livingston Chair of Poetry, and was named the state's Poet Laureate in 2014, a title that suited a poet who never had much use for rules. He wrote wild, associative poems that leapt from grief to slapstick in the space of a single line, more curious about what a poem could survive than about its job. |
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His poems piled image on image until they nearly buckled under their own generosity, critics reaching for words like circus and Bosch to describe the effect.
In 2006 he was diagnosed with a degenerative heart condition. He kept writing anyway, growing louder instead of smaller, until a transplant in 2011 gave him a second heart.
The poems that followed did not soften. They got stranger, funnier, more grateful, and more alive.
"Desire is perpetual transformation."
— Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
He never wrote like a man playing it safe, not before the transplant and not after. Audacity, for Young, was not a mood he visited. It was how he stayed alive, then how he said thank you for it.
If a borrowed heart can write like that, see what yours can do.
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Devices
Getting the Word Wrong on Purpose
Catachresis is the deliberate misuse of a word, stretched past what it was built to do until it means something new. Rhetoricians have called it, without irony, a bold and startling use of language. That is not incidental. The device is audacity given grammar, the nerve to be technically wrong so the sentence can be emotionally right. |
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Anne Carson has spent a career doing exactly this, welding grief to geometry, feeling to shapes no dictionary would sanction. In her poem "Essay on What I Think About Most," she names the trick outright:
"metaphors teach the mind to enjoy error"
— Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours
Carson does not say for us to tolerate error. She says enjoy it. Carson is naming the nerve required to misuse a word on purpose and trust the reader into the wrongness, because the wrongness is exactly where the truth had been hiding all along. That is audacity. May we not be fearless, but rather willing to be wrong in public and call it art.
See what happens when a poet lets a word fail on purpose.
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Testaments
The Book Dedicated to Everyone Who Said No
By 1934, E.E. Cummings had published five books, a novel, and a play, yet none of that mattered to the fourteen publishing houses that rejected his new manuscript in a row. Some rejections came down to money, since poetry barely sold during the Depression. Some came down to politics. Cummings had just published Eimi, a scathing account of his travels through Stalin's Soviet Union, at a moment when socialism was treated as sacred ground by much of the literary establishment. Being right about something deeply unpopular cost him fourteen closed doors, one after another, and not one publisher changed course. |
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He did not soften the manuscript to win any of them back. His mother put up three hundred dollars, and he self-published the book in 1935 under the title No Thanks. The dedication page lists all fourteen publishers by name, arranged deliberately in the shape of a funeral urn, set beneath the words "NO THANKS TO" like an epitaph carved for the occasion. History eventually proved him right, since No Thanks is now considered among his most essential collections.
Audacity, for Cummings, was not shouting louder than his critics. It was building them a small, permanent monument out of their own rejection letters.
See the book that turned fourteen rejections into a masterpiece.
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Creative Spotlight
The Camera That Refuses to Take Your Picture
Point a Poetry Camera at something and press the shutter. Nothing gets saved anywhere. There is no photo, no file, no upload. Instead, a small thermal printer inside whirs to life and hands you a poem about what it just saw, written on the spot and gone the moment you walk away with the paper. |
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Kelin Zhang and Ryan Mather built the first one as an art project, wiring a Raspberry Pi and a receipt printer into the body of a vintage camera, then open sourced the whole build for anyone willing to try it themselves. The design has since traveled to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, where visitors used it to write themselves into a poem instead of a photograph.
Building a camera that refuses its own basic job takes real nerve. That is the whole audacity of it, trading the easy capture for something meant to be read, not glanced at and gone.
See what a camera looks like when it dares to write instead of shoot.
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