A POET CROSSING OVER INTO THE DOMAIN of novel is a different kind of test. At stake is whether an instrument built for the compression and the minute can survive being stretched across a couple hundred pages. Mike Andrelczyk’s Submarines (Malarkey Books, 2026), his first novel after five collections of poetry, proves just how those sensibilities could be deftly carried over from one medium to another.

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Formally speaking, the book is broken into short paragraphs separated by a lone dollar sign, a device that reads less like a scene break than a stanza break at times, and the sentences underneath keep the cadenced, associative rhythm of a poetic hand at work. Andrelczyk’s knack for the tiny poem and the humorous poem lurk under the surface of those pages like a submarine, emerging in bursts of well-timed comedic relief. The humor here is as deadpan as it is functional, wherein paragraphs land like punchlines even when they don’t try to be funny or smart. It’s in that self-conscious unseriousness (or, dare I say, nonchalance) the novel finds its true voice, and we strangely feel closest to the narrator when the narrator becomes his own worst, most cruelly funny, honest critic (“Nothing was what I was really good at”).

^{Submarines © courtesy Mike Andrelczyk
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It’s fair to claim that this overarching sense of aimlessness runs the general engine of the novel. In Submarines, an unnamed narrator flees a cockroach-infested Los Angeles apartment for his grandmother’s house on the Delaware shore, ostensibly to take care of her and actually to avoid figuring out what his life is actually building toward. He fails to get hired at a bakery, a bar, and the Food Lion (it’s no wonder his resume lists embezzlement under skills), volunteers briefly at a marine biology lab where students bury dolphin skeletons for the maggots to clean, and eventually lands work as a bellman at a beachfront hotel called the Palms, where he starts betting borrowed money on baseball through a bookie named Christopher. Around this seemingly ordinary slacker plot Andrelczyk builds a second, hallucinated town: an eighteenth-century British naval blockade commanded by a Commodore who lobs the occasional cannonball into Main Street, an osprey the narrator treats as a kind of personal deity, and clouds that keep assembling themselves into the shape of submarines. The mundane and the fantastical are never separated by a wink: a scene about stealing Percocet from a one-legged neighbor’s pill basket sits next to a scene about a merman pickled in a museum case, and the prose doesn’t change register between these shifts.

This narrative whimsy is intentional and crystallizes the book’s real trick. Andrelczyk lets his narrator interrupt himself constantly and the effect owes something to Denis Johnson’s junk-sick lyricism crossed with the deadpan of alt-lit’s confessional stylists, filtered through a narrator who occasionally name-drops Raymond Chandler as an allusion to his life (“The books were full of clear action and decisiveness. The exact opposite of my life”) and eventually writes (or hallucinates) an entire noir subplot around it that involves a hitman, a stolen diamond, and a shooting in the hotel. Those noir passages offer one of the most purely entertaining stretches in the book, and also the most revealing. They seem to purposely be juxtaposed with the material that’s harder to joke around: the grandmother’s slide into dementia, the auction of the family house, the driftwood he saves from a dumpster the size of a submarine, and so on. The flatly delivered humor and the grief never really compete with but complement each other on these pages: “The house was like a life. Empty, then filled with memories and then emptied out again.”



^{Submarines © courtesy Mike Andrelczyk
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The submarines, in the meantime, repeatedly surface and disappear like stuff of dreams, gathering myriad meanings without settling into a symbol one could neatly decode. Throughout the novel, we see them to oscillate between everything from military paranoia to childhood play to intoxication to death to depression to whatnot, none ever falling in the throes of allegory. In this sense, it’s probably not surprising at all that Submarines closes on its narrator descending into a hallucinated submarine and surfacing inside a casino, handed a coin by the woman he loves, putting his money down on a wheel that’s still spinning as the book closes, which is as fair a description of the whole novel’s arc as any single image could give. Andrelczyk proves that he is most at home in as tiny and controlled a space as that of a submarine; whether he’ll choose to return to the looser, riskier space of the novel as his protagonist is an open question, but he already shows he owns the place. Either way, the wheel he’s built here is well worth watching it spin and spin and spin. •

Submarines is available for purchase through Malarkey Books.





Mike Andrelczyk is the author of five collections of poetry including Tennis Leg and !!!. His work has been published in X-R-A-Y, House of Vlad, Blue Arrangements, and elsewhere online and in print. He lives with his wife in Pennsylvania.

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