An Arm’s Length from Change: A Review of Brad Liening's You’re Doing It Wrong by Jasper Adams-Smith

You’re Doing it Wrong, new from Brad Liening in 2025, is a poetry collection that feels, in places, suspended outside of time. It makes consistent reference to issues well within the bounds of modern discourse—climate change, social media ownership and use, artificial intelligence, the clearing of homeless encampments—yet many of its writing sensibilities feel rooted in the early Internet era, the late 90s and early aughts. This translates less to any specific use of slang or sense of timeframe than it does to the the style of the writing itself. The book's interior title, as well as a few interstitials, are translated into Wingdings font, and the consistent repetition of the phrase, "it’s like," across multiple poems evoked thoughts for me of the simile-laden pop rock ballads of that period.

None of this is necessarily a criticism. To the contrary, this dissonance feels, at least to some extent, intentional, enhancing a sense of displacement and disaffection throughout the entire collection. Through his eight prior works, most recently collections Michigan Darkness Movies and Inferno 2, this is a topic that Liening is long familiar with covering. You can also find Liening’s work in Miracle Monocle's micro-anthology series. 

The modern world as Liening presents it is an intimidating place, teetering on the brink of man-made disaster, where fulfillment is largely found in the observation of small moments. The people in that world range from vapidly embracing their own doom to being ground down by the capitalistic rat race. To call these protest poems would be a misnomer; they are, instead, poems of observation, focused on inevitable shutdown and decay.

The standout moments of this collection come largely from its capacity for understatement. One of the virtues of a relatively brief collection like this one is the potential for a density of ideas. The collection is at its strongest when leaning into this, in the lines where it compresses an experience either universal or personal within a couple of lines. “Minotaur,” for example, spends time imagining a woman in an insurance cubical farm imagining and stifling a more creative life, and “A Whisper of Ketchup” captures one of those few fleeting snatches of beauty on a smoke break: “Squirrels race/through the canopy and leaves shiver/like a mystery, half-forgotten./You could do this forever./You have 30 minutes for lunch.” Moments like these humanize issues ripped straight from the headlines, providing moments of connection even where the potential for hope is still fleeting.

For those who enjoy poetry’s capacity for brevity and conveying a strong sense of authorial voice, this collection exemplifies both. Literary works, especially those as personal and often experimental as poetry has the potential to be, often defy universal recommendation, and this goes double in the atomized space of subcultures that the Internet age has created. Judging by the content of this collection, however, the latter point is something Liening has cultivated a keen awareness of—if a largely negative one.

Those readers who never knew a world without social media and the Internet—an ever-increasing number, myself included—will at once find much to recognize in his social critiques and a purposeful outsider’s perspective, a holding at arm’s length. Perhaps those of us who grew up in the midst of an age where, as “Tuesday Tragedies” puts it, “Several disasters unfold very slowly,” will be able to claw some measure of fulfillment from it or (dare I say it) make a meaningful change. Or perhaps, as the title of this collection might indicate, we’re doing it all wrong.

You’re Doing It Wrong is available for purchase online. Excerpts are available via Stink Eye, tragickal, Microliths, and Urtica.