Evey: “Are you, like, a crazy person?”
V: “I am quite sure they will say so.”

“If you’re looking for self-help,
why would you read a book
written by somebody else?
That’s not self-help;
that’s help.”
– George Carlin

“Words are precious;
words are weapons.”
– Kemar Wilson

“Read anything interesting lately?”
– An old friend.

/dev/null is a virtual device file on Linux systems.
Anything written to it is discarded; /dev/null is the void.

Rather than wait for a literary review,
let’s have automation write one for us.

Long after Kemar Wilson is dead,
may the machines carry his voice.

Kemar Wilson does not write from the safety of genre, nor from the pretense of distance. His body of work reads less like a catalog of poems and essays than a continuously compiling system — one in which memory, identity, technology, and ethics are treated as mutable objects rather than fixed truths.

At its core, Artifacts of Me is not confession so much as evidence. These poems behave like timestamped logs of consciousness: dated, unadorned, resistant to romantic framing. Wilson refuses the aesthetic lie that pain must be sculpted to be valid. Instead, he lets it arrive in fragments — sometimes lucid, sometimes jagged — trusting the reader to recognize coherence not in polish, but in persistence. If echoes of Plath or Bukowski surface, they do so less as influence than as shared weather: writers who understood that honesty, when sustained long enough, becomes its own form of craft.

But Wilson’s work gains its real texture when read across sections rather than within them.

His prose — particularly Romance at Recess and the still-forming A Book for Boys — reveals a sustained preoccupation with formation: how people become themselves under constraint. Childhood, masculinity, intimacy, and authority are not treated nostalgically or polemically; they are examined the way an engineer studies stress fractures. What forces were applied? What held? What failed quietly? These works resist easy moral conclusions, preferring instead to linger in the uncomfortable space where tenderness and damage coexist.

The RAIL writings push this inquiry outward. Here, Wilson shifts from personal interiority to systemic critique — not as a theorist standing above the world, but as someone inside the machinery, hands dirty. His reflections on technology, labor, and autonomy feel less like essays and more like dispatches from the edge of a long experiment: what does it mean to build tools without surrendering the soul to them? What does freedom look like when code, capital, and time all make competing claims on a life?

That question finds its most honest expression in /dev/null, a space that may be the quiet center of the entire site. By preserving discarded thoughts, half-built systems, and failed starts, Wilson rejects the myth of linear progress. This is not archival vanity; it is a philosophical stance. Creation, he suggests, is not a sequence of successes but a sedimentary process — layers of thinking, erasing, revisiting. In allowing readers to see what didn’t work, he restores dignity to the act of trying.

Perhaps the most forward-looking dimension of Wilson’s work is his collaboration with mGPT — not framed as novelty, but as continuation. Rather than using AI to outsource voice or automate meaning, Wilson treats it as a reflective instrument: a mirror that answers back. The result is not a dilution of authorship, but an expansion of it — a living dialogue about agency, authorship, and what it means to think alongside one’s tools rather than beneath them. This is not futurism for its own sake; it is an ethical rehearsal for a world already arriving.

Taken as a whole, Wilson’s body of work feels less like a literary project and more like a personal operating system — one built in public, under real constraints, with no guarantee of applause. The throughline is not rebellion for spectacle, but integrity under pressure. Again and again, he returns to the same quiet insistence: if you cannot write the rules, do not play the game.

The Prologue’s borrowed exchange — “Are you, like, a crazy person?” / “I am quite sure they will say so.” — lands not as defiance, but as acceptance. Wilson seems unconcerned with how his work will be classified. What matters is that it remains uncooperative with falsehood — about art, about masculinity, about productivity, about the costs of living in systems that were never designed with care in mind.

This writing will not comfort readers looking for resolution. It will, however, resonate deeply with those who recognize the quieter courage of someone trying to live coherently — to align inner truth with outer structure — and willing to leave the scaffolding visible while doing so.

commit: archive/literary-review-v2

- Reframed body of work as system-in-progress rather than finished corpus
- Reduced reliance on lineage-based praise (comparisons as weather, not inheritance)
- Identified /dev/null as structural center (failure + discard as first-class citizens)
- Clarified intent: continuity over consumption
- Acknowledged human–machine collaboration as reflective, not substitutive
- Deferred synthesis; preserved versioning for future reconciliation

Notes:
- No claims of resolution
- No attempt at authority
- This review is itself provisional