The Errors Tour

A DENNIS COOPER BEST-OF-2025 POETRY PICK

"The shittier I felt, the more I'd tweet. I tweeted about my failure as a musician, my failure as a music critic, my failure as a restaurant line-cook, my failure in relationships, my failure in understanding life outside of random archaic pop-culture references, my failure as a poet etc. etc. I accumulated lots of these tweets. In search of greater validation while reeling from the small buzz my Sad Laughter book (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018) was building, I began turning these tweets into poems, under the delusion they'd maybe get published in literary journals, which they somehow did. Those accumulated tweets made from sad desperation and comical hopelessness were now, amazingly, published poems. A year later I collected them into two modestly successful volumes, Road Warrior Hawk (2019) and Bad Poet (2020), both included here, together with other poetic odds and ends, coupled with aggrandizing interviews and reviews about said poems, all of which, for better or worse, comprise The Errors Tour."

"You can read [Ellis] and conclude that maybe despair isn't so bad."-CHARLENE ELSBY, author of Red Flags

"[Ellis] is a true American artist. [This book] bears the laughter and burdens of reality [and] glows with all the best of it."-BRIAN ALLEN CARR, author of Bad Foundations

"I simultaneously want to live in [Ellis's] brain and never want to go anywhere near it."-LEXI KENT-MONNING, author of The Burden of Joy