Krumrie, Kelly: Concentric Macroscope

Crop Circle Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 17, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

“Especially the search for the language of god—something so perfectly impenetrable it’d break our senses: the sight of it, it on the tongue, in the ear or air, shattering whatever it touches like glass.

I would like to make something perfect, but to state that goal would be to kill it—make nothing, I’d wait forever, die waiting.”

Deep in the woods, the Agency has assigned a linguist to create a language to write a message which will be transmitted by a set of looming radio towers. The purpose and audience for the message are unknown to her. She grows hauntingly obsessed with her inability to complete her task as something forms within her. The sounds of the natural environment mount alongside paranoid whisperings of the nearby townspeople. And then the linguist spirals outward and begins to see macroscopically, all at once, like the concentric circles of a vibration.

Kelly Krumrie’s CONCENTRIC MACROSCOPE is an unsettling gaze into the foundations of language. It ushers soundscape into narrative and memory, and builds a world where fog, light, and water are the surest indications of reality. The form of Krumrie's experimental style layers time and space from one sentence to the next, rendering the text as an elongated, gorgeous incantation. This form, along with the narrator’s voice and mission, is akin to what might happen at the bizarre intersection of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jeff VanderMeer, and Silvina Ocampo. 𖣥

"With terrains and conflicts reminiscent of Jeff VanderMeer’s AREA X or Ted Chiang’s "Story of Your Life," but as if channeled by Lisa Robertson and Rosmarie Waldrop (having coffee with Blanchot and Jabès), Krumrie’s latest novel is a meditation on inscription systems both legible and asemic, crackling with monkish eroticism, much like the escapades of its linguist protagonist. CONCENTRIC MACROSCOPE is a literary immersion tank, a speculative sound bath pulsing with frequencies, subterranean and extraterrestrial, like the pylons at the heart of its first-contact style mystery centering the quantum uncertainty of language." –Joanna Howard–

"Channeling the dexterity of Renee Gladman's "thinking texts" alongside the lucidity and pacing of Jenny Offill, Kelly Krumrie’s CONCENTRIC MACROSCOPE uses language to build architectures that generate a world. This is a book of the unconscious, one that cultivates a deepened relationship to not-knowing. In stunning, sparse prose—an ether of technology and longing—Krumrie thinks analytically about what we cannot yet hear in our own language, and in languages not yet invented." –Claire Donato–