Crumbbook, by Delia Rainey

Prose, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Crumbbook is an inventory of thoughts and visual experiences during a particular span of months of 2020, inside a particular span of neighborhood in Chicago. The project began as a strong desire to accumulate anything about real life, originally posted online as delia-writes-everyday-2020. Fragments trespass “the personal” and public exteriors. A diary written during the early pandemic, scattered bits connect to each other: crumbs sprayed onto park blankets, the binding of books, the shitty chromebook, a wicker chair on the stoop, and conversations with neighbors. Crumbs are the aftermath of consuming and forgetting amongst daily movement and action. Crumbbook wants to remember: here was my life. The act of writing down the world, walking around or staring off into space, derives from a need to solve anxiety -- to focus on immediate objects and archiving memories to feel real, to face mortality. Mundane boundaries and screens into oth