Corrao, Mike: Being Towards Death

Crop Circle Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 14, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

"Like splicing grindcore lyrics onto impossible digital sculpture sites, Being Towards Death reads like an all-monochrome minimalist RPG gassed with the aura of the iconic Unknown Pleasures logo. Mike Corrao’s uncanny knack for unpacking our present day hellscape into its component bits and bugs hits like a digital designer drug you aren’t likely to remember how to unsee." —BLAKE BUTLER

"Being Towards Death reads as a series of gorgeous glitches, doing what good poetry should always do: expose the ways we derange language and our selves through it. After reading, you'll return to the SMS messages, social media doomscrolls, and AI slop reels where our language lives today with a better sense of what's going on and how it's changing you." —AIDAN WALKER

…Within the fabric of dying capitalism, the omniscient voice emerges. It watches you, fixates on your every movement as you spiral and spill through a compound of occult, otherworldly structures that have been converted into low-income housing. In this slippery, dark realm, ideas from previous iterations of humanity are irrecoverable, undownloadable. Only fragments of language remain: textured, glitchy, unpredictable.

The voice tells you: “We are living in times of exceptional instability.” Extreme and unresolvable polarities compose the foundation of the text: collapse + creation; confusion + elation; hilarity + hypnosis; concealment + omniscience. Being Towards Death presents a cruelty severe enough to manipulate the framework of matter and life itself.

The work resists traditional genre conformity entirely. Corrao’s structural, architectonic illustrations spill over the text in designs of chaos and unrest. They act as winding roads among a landscape where language suffocates on itself, backdropped by climate anxiety, housing inequality, and poverty.

Although you’ll exit Being Towards Death, its design will stay woven inside you, gouging permanent structures into your psyche. Even after the world returns, glimmers of Corrao’s Molochian underworld still slip through its seams.