Reviewed by Kevin Lichty

As a primer, Matthew Burnside gives his readers a set of potential rules on how to engage with Wiki of Infinite Sorrows, many of which are contradictory. One rule states, "you are encouraged to bury this book in the woods. If it is returned to you by wolves it was truly yours all along," signaling the book as a precious thing. This directly challenges another rule, which reads, "you are encouraged to regift this book as many times as you wish," painting the book as undesirable. And, indeed, the concept of the book is itself contradictory by nature: an analog version of a digital wiki page printed on paper and bound in the traditional way of books.

How are we meant to engage with a wiki? Perhaps by stumbling on the site after a Google search and clicking our way down a rabbit hole of obsession or whimsy or desire. How are we meant to engage with an analog book? For most of us, it is a linear experience, read cover to cover. We can't help (or at least I can't) that the first page marches us in sequential numeric order until it comes to an ending point (in this case page 150). The fact that Burnside’s primer tells us that this is not necessarily how we are meant to engage in this book (I could have, for instance, read it backwards, one page at a time, or in any particular order according to the rules of engagement) didn’t stop me from doing what I always do.

This tension, where the digital becomes analog becomes digital, is the through-line in the various narratives, snapshots, entries, and musings of the wiki. It is a theme that drives the story arc of one of the major wiki entries, "Drifting toward Glitch," where a boy, grieving the loss of his brother, goes on an analog quest to reunite with him inside of a digital game to open an analog portal to a digital (un)space inside the game. There is something innocent, whimsical, and jarring about this scenario. It is truly compelling when the boy's mother picks up a controller in an attempt to connect, in some way, to what she has lost, what has happened with both of her sons. What her younger son did in his innocence is terrifying when experienced through the inexpert hands of his mother trying to bring some semblance of them back. After the wiki has given us the boy's fantasy, now we must sit with the reality of the mother’s experience of its end result.

The book, aware of itself as a work of fiction, still asks us to engage in it as though it were not, and it does so in multiple ways. The first is the decoding of the messages left behind by the poet Matthew Burnside, the "real" author made a "fictional" character inside of the book. And we, as "real" readers, through our voluntary participation in the project of decoding the very real messages left behind inside of black balloons floated off the apartment balcony of the fake Burnside, are made fictional by participating in the fake project created by a small group of fictional residents of the town of Brownleaf. And because we are reading this "fake" Wiki, this fake website is made real to us through this real artifact left on the pages of our real book.  Thus, our scavenger hunt through the book looking for the cypher hidden amongst the other entries, musings, and poems is made real. So we are left with a question: do we become fiction by becoming a part of the book, or does the fiction become real by our participation with it?

What is "real" blurs inside these pages, as it must, because it is made so only through language, and it is only with our participation as readers that that language is made real as we are made to feel something. This is the structural genius of the book, both at the macro level and the micro level. 

Ultimately, the big question this book seems to be asking is how to engage with art and each other in a post-human world and still remain human. What is real? Are my emotional connections to the characters in this book in my hands real? Is my identification with the characters I am manipulating on my screen, the ones who are both meant to be me (or at least representations of me) and also not me, real? Is this what it means to be human now, to be made real only when our digitized selves are acknowledged by the digitized selves of others?

Indeed, I was confused by the poem "Intermission," with its Frostian "go out and frolic in the world" message when I first encountered it early in the book. But now, perhaps this poem is the most resonant, as well as Burnside's insertion of himself as a character desperately trying to make his poems real by lifting them (and eventually himself) off the balcony of his apartment to be sent out into the world. After all, here I am disappearing inside of this wiki, one that is real, present and weighted in my hands, lying here in my bed with my wife beside me and this thing, this book, is asking, begging me, to take a break and to put it down and to go to "climb a tree" or to "earn a callus" or to "live all that shit" I've read about in the stack of books by my nightstand. So many contradictions: a book that begs not to be read, a wiki that is a binding of dead trees, a post-human consciousness, a lack made real by the glow of a screen.