Reviewed by J.M.C. Kane
Content Warning: Racism and violence
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Every poem in Megan Gannon’s Dispatch from Every Second Guess carries the word Dispatch in its title, and a dispatch, unlike a letter, has no named recipient. It is address sent into the void, toward whoever might receive it — or, in the book’s own definition, “address without a clear / recipient.” That gesture, a hand extended across a gap toward someone who may not be there, is the book’s governing motion, and I should say at the outset that I know it from the inside. I am autistic. So, by her own account, is Gannon, who has said the finished book reads as “a memoir of a high masking, Level 1 autistic.” Reading it, I kept meeting my own cognition on the page — not as subject matter, but as form. Gannon has not softened the mind’s difficulty into acceptable subject matter so much as she has made the difficulty structural. The book does not explain autistic cognition from the outside. It composes in its weather.
The epigraph, from Joseph Beuys, sets the terms of everything that follows: “A lifetime is not so long. / You cannot wait for a tool without blood on it.” No clean instrument is coming. You work with the bloodied one or you do not work. A book that begins there cannot also promise to be lovely, and Gannon knows it — “No one will call this book beautiful,” she writes, and offers it as a dare. What I want to argue is that this is, before it is anything else, a book whose shape is autistic, and that its two hardest subjects — the terror of raising a Black son in America, and the near-impossibility of forgiving oneself — are carried through the same formal machinery that makes the book’s neurology legible.
The couplet is the book’s smallest unit and its whole theory. Gannon has said she chose the couplet “because I’m trying to connect with someone”: two lines, a reaching toward a second party. But watch how she uses it. Her sentences almost never close on the couplet; they spill across the white gap into the next, so that reading her is a continual leap over a space the eye must clear to finish the thought. The form is a diagram of the second guess — the pause where certainty should be, the distance to a recipient built into the line itself. “Dispatch on Etymology” makes the conceit plain and then, at its close, drops the mask entirely: “the static-crackle / clearing of a voice. Hello? Can you hear me? / Does anyone read me? Hello?” That is the sound of address without a clear recipient. It is also, exactly, the sound of a person who has learned that connection cannot be assumed and must be attempted, twice, into a silence, or a noise too loud, that may not answer.
The second-guessing is everywhere, and it earns its keep as survival rather than mannerism. Gannon’s poems audit themselves in real time — parenthetical corrections, bracketed redactions (“leaving the baby’s sister to [make a mistake]”), the flat self-command “Admit it,” the enumerating litanies that hunt for an origin because no single one can be trusted to be self-evident: “Start with your first / poor decision, or back further, start / with the woman whose daily / whittling/belittling taught you…” A mind that cannot rely on the intuitive read audits everything, itemizes, revises. “Dispatch on the Obvious,” which closes the book, says so without cover: here is “a mind that only sees / what’s made too plain,” a self that has “always needed all the red string connecting / the evidence to convince me that my own mind / is trustworthy.” Its confession — “you could be lying naked in my bed / and still I would not see that you want me” — reads less as a lament about love than as an account of a cognition that cannot decode what is not stated outright. The last words of the book are its plainest possible request: “I need you to believe me.”
Watch, too, what Gannon does with the second person. For most of the book, “you” is self-surveillance, the self addressing the self as suspect. In “Dispatch to the Crone” it becomes an instrument of torture — a voice from the emptied future house that will not let the exhausted mother have the quiet she has earned. It dangles the fantasy, “Is the house quiet where you are? / Are all of the cabinet doors closed,” then flays it with a run of coined negations, the exact tendernesses that will simply cease: “Their foreheads go unkissed, their backs / unscratched, their ears unhummed… Your arms are weak with unhugging.” Then the knife: “You have longed for this emptiness, / haven’t you?” The future self prosecuting the present self for wanting rest. It is the cruelest poem here because it turns the mind’s own auditing voice against the one thing the mind wanted.
And then there is “Dispatch for the Third Person,” the longest poem in the book and the one that holds its whole logic in a single mechanism. The premise is a survival technique stated outright: “maybe we could forgive ourselves / if we thought of ourselves in the third person.” Forgiveness requires distance; the self can only be pardoned once it is othered into a he, a she, a stranger seen from far enough away to feel something other than disgust. The poem is a chain of such attempts — the neglected boy, the girl fighting her mother, the woman who becomes the withholding mother — each a version of the self held at arm’s length. Its epigraph is Mary Oliver’s most famous absolution: “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” And the poem cannot accept it. It re-literalizes the metaphor — “So I went to the mountains to run a hundred miles,” [. . .] “until I felt I’d been punished enough.” Grace, offered for free, will not compute; it has to be converted into a measurable, bodily transaction, a hundred literal miles — toenails shed and every drop of salt wrung from air-starved muscles — before it can be felt at all. I know of no more exact rendering of the autistic relation to an abstraction one cannot simply receive.
The poem ends by confessing that it cannot end: “There is no way to end / this poem in which so many children have been / harmed. There is no way to ask a self / for forgiveness.” And then the chain of puns only this mind could build: “this relentless third degree heals your third-degree burn / into a third-degree crime and we’ve served our sentence.” The word will not stop turning, because the mind will not stop turning it — interrogation, wound, offense, punishment, grammar. This is the title made flesh: no first guess ever trusted, the couplets going on because a poem about unforgivable harm has nowhere it is permitted to stop.
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The same apparatus that cannot trust its read of a lover cannot trust its own racial authority, and this is where the book earns its hardest pages. Gannon is a white mother of a Black son, and at least five of her dispatches circle that fact, each rotating it to catch a new face of complicity. In “Dispatch from the Hotel Pool,” a white stranger flings the poet’s Black son across the concrete and calls it a misunderstanding, and the mother is left shaking while the boy laughs, unhurt and unaware. In “Redacted Dispatch with Parenthetical Hindsight,” the danger is inside the house: a white child blames the Black boy she lives with for her own mistake — “as any child might,” the poem is quick to grant — and the adults let it stand, the father saying nothing, until “the next day you left and took the boys with you.” The verdict is total — the racism the book dreads from strangers is being taught “under your roof.”
Then the ghazal, where the book does something to itself I have not seen a collection do. “Dispatch as a Late-Addition Ghazal” builds its refrain on safe — “No Nerf guns, no uncombed hair, no hoodies. No solo runs / for Skittles, no solo runs ever” — the whole American liturgy of what a Black child must not do to survive, closing on the poet’s own signature, as the form requires: “Megan’s son could touch any door and say safe.” But the ghazal exists only because another poem confesses it into being. In “Dispatch from the Manuscript’s Every Second Guess,” Gannon audits her own book and finds that “your Black son is never a you / in these poems. You other him to talk about racism,” then, parenthetically: “(You went back and wrote that ghazal / for him when you realized the oversight. Admit it.)” The repair is formal — written after the fact, for a failure the book refuses to bury — and the failure is the book’s, not the family’s: what the poem indicts is a problem in its own making, a Black child turned into an occasion for a white speaker’s reckoning, not a wound in the bond behind it. The care is real and documented — Gannon credits a “sensitivity reader” in her acknowledgments — and the poems make that care visible as labor rather than claim it as virtue.
One poem goes further, and refuses the book’s own device — metaphor itself. In “Dispatch from the Kmart Party Aisle,” shopping for her son’s seventh birthday, the poet finds a dying bird and catches herself mid-figure — “I’m turning the bird into a metaphor” — then forbids it, again and again: “Please, there is no metaphor here,” “there is no metaphor / for worrying about how tall he is for his age.” Around that refusal the poem gathers Philando Castile bleeding out beside a girlfriend who dared not touch him, and the Trayvon Martin acquittal that fell on the son’s fourth birthday. For this subject, Gannon decides, the consoling figure is itself a failure — and she will not spare her own hands: “I tried to help the bird and, instead, killed it more quickly. / When I got home I thought, bird flu, and washed my hands.”
The hardest of these, “Dispatch from the Missing Police Report,” turns the instrument on the poet’s own hand. A white nephew is beaten bloody by his Black best friend, and the poem knows precisely how combustible that sentence is in a white woman’s mouth — “I don’t want to tell one more story that will make / a Black boy seem scary, that will get a Black man killed” — and tells it anyway, to reach a truth about power it will not excuse itself from: “even when not wielding power, we retain it.” The mercy of not calling the police is also, the poem insists, an exercise of the thing it hates. This is second-guessing carried all the way outward until it becomes an ethics: a mind that audits itself will, if it is honest, audit its own whiteness with the same relentlessness, and find no clean place to stand. As autistics, we have a Euclidean sense of right and wrong. But the fulcrum hinges on a moral plane, not the legal one. Not calling the police is simply the moral act, axiomatic, done. That the law would call the same act a lie — an injustice to the state — is real, but it arrives as an afterthought, a second-order noise against a first-order certainty. The problem, though, as Gannon uses this poem to illustrate, is that the second-order noise never goes away.
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Return, at the last, to Beuys and the bloodied tool. What does a poet do who has forsworn beauty? She makes it anyway, out of what is broken. “Dispatch from the Domestic Interior” gives the method its clearest image: “the scraps and fabric, the broken bits / and detritus cobbled into new likenesses / are what I use to build my nest.” The elegy for Mary Oliver hears “new music / constructed from the pieces of arpeggios played / by instruments soon too brittle to be touched.” “Dispatch from the Middle Distance” names the aesthetic outright — kintsugi, “the beauty in brokenness… a bowl mended with gold / we can hold in our hands and lift to our lips.”
Here is the book’s most moving contradiction, the one its self-suspicion cannot suppress: it keeps being beautiful. “No one will call this book beautiful,” Gannon insists — and then writes the rosemary and mint of “Dispatch from the Unwritten” and the inked cherry blossoms of “Middle Distance.” The anti-beauty stance never settles; it is a battle the poems keep losing, gorgeously, against their own program. “Dispatch from My Internalized Misogyny” is where that battle turns honest, because there Gannon admits she is not only the beauty-machine’s casualty but one of its enforcers — “When I spit another woman’s name with the word awful, / I remember the bad taste comes from my own tongue” — and even catches her own recurring flower-imagery in the act: “enough with the botanical imagery. Women’s bodies / don’t exist to flower fleetingly before ripening into usefulness.” The book audits its aesthetic the way it audits everything else. Gannon has named the stakes plainly: the book “started to feel like a feminist project” once she “saw the dearth of books written by women about their own ugliness.” She wanted hard truths, not grace.
What keeps all this from collapsing into pure self-laceration is that the book is, finally, a record of return. The rupture of “Redacted” — the leaving, the boys taken — is not the end of the story. “Dispatch Halfway Up the Summit” finds the family reassembled and climbing: “we took the child we’d made / to the mountains,” love pared to its plainest instruction, “one foot, / another, head down, now stop / and look up.” The dedication holds them all: “For Lauren, Manny, and Silas / And for Jeremy—all of it. / Always.” The book leaves and comes back. It is hurt, and does some of the hurting, and stays.
What Gannon has written, through a series of dispatches to no named recipient — which is to say, to all of us — is a book that describes what it sounds like to reach for another person when you cannot assume the reaching will land: to audit every word, to forgive, especially yourself, only in the third person, to distrust the beautiful and make it anyway, to send the report into the dark and wait. Does anyone read me? Hello? I did. And the last thing the book asks is the truest thing an autistic writer ever asks of a reader, the thing the whole apparatus of second-guessing is built to earn: I need you to believe me.
Title: Dispatch from Every Second Guess
Author: Megan Gannon
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Date: 2026
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About the Reviewer
J.M.C. Kane is the author of the nonfiction book Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to Finally See It (CollectiveInk UK). His prose work has been published in more than three dozen literary journals and magazines, including Plough, Camas, AMERICA Magazine, Commonweal, and The New Ohio Review, where his essay, “Nomenclature of a Life,” cataloguing his experience as an ASD-1, was awarded the 2026 Ellis Prize for Nonfiction. Kane received the Honorable Mention in the 2026 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize and his recent poem “Sediment” was the runner-up in the 2025 Gulf Coast Journal Poetry Prize. He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an environmental attorney.