Most of my friends, even the ones who share many of my interests, hate the books I recommend to them (at least for the first fifteen pages). Probably because I have an unconscious addiction to the trauma of being dropped into a confusing situation. Something about replicating birth. When I first meet a book, I like it to make me feel out of place. I like to feel the structure or language push up against me and be totally unsure about its rightness or wrongness. Andrew Weatherhead’s latest book of poetry, $50,000, has made me feel what all my favorite books do. What begins with jarring confusion over form transformed this reader into a believer in the pace and texture of the mundane. In this case, the form is soul-crushing formulaic pithiness. But, by the end, I was gripped by the genuine connection we often only feel when we meet those who are lonely in the ways we have also been lonely. On a surface read, the book appears to the reader as either a 100-ish page singular poem with non-typical, dead even spacing between each stanza, or a collection of Zen-adjacent contemporary wisdoms collected and assembled in almost Dadaist continue...