Despite its directional title, Chris Campanioni’s hybrid text north by north/west: (an attention to frequency) is a virtuosic linguistic collage that, more often than not, indulges in indirection and subversion. Taking inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock, who was known for his narrative deception and generic subterfuge (even going so far as to kill off his leading lady halfway through the horror classic Psycho), Campanioni performs a bait-and-switch, invoking Hitchcock with his title, but never confronting his film outright. Dreaming up alternate scenes, reminiscing on an interpretative dance number he made based on Hitchcock’s unproduced films, explaining how Hitchcock purposefully perplexed his star Cary Grant with a convoluted script—this book is less interested in the film than its imaginative effect on the author/viewer, and the stowaway conceptions about American identity, migration, transportation, and dislocation that it contains. And yet, when reading the text closely, one finds that many elements of the film are there, transmuted through the author’s own experiences. Like Roger Thornhill, the main character of Hitchcock’s film, who must regain his sense of self after being mistaken for a spy and embroiled in an international conspiracy, Campanioni wrangles field notes, novel excerpts, historical criticism, verse, photography, and a variety of other textual modes into an exploration of his own origins as he searches for what it means to be the American-born son of Cuban and Polish exiles and for a way to tell his story without succumbing to the assimilationist and othering rhetoric that is sanctioned by the cultural elite.
In north by north/west, form and content are intimately tethered. Resisting genres and the confinements of narrative structure, Campanioni splits his text into ten discrete yet thematically related sections, each of which uses fragmentation, chronological ambiguity, and recursion to embody the flux of the digital world and the author’s lithe and mobile response to it, crafting a book that continually redefines itself as “a series of evaporating glances,” “an arena for testing out ideas and theories,” and “a video diary.” Pinning a single definition down would mean closing things off; this, however, is a book that wants openness and utter receptivity. Campanioni declares his constitutional opposition to completion in its very first sentence, stating, “I was born unfinished.” Having been born prematurely, he can be taken literally here, but he also employs this line and its subsequent refrains as a central metaphor for the book itself, which does not want to restate knowledge or cement relationships; rather, it desires new language, literary forms, and an unprecedented politics of possibility. This idea is furthered in the book’s second section (“< sequence 1”), where he discusses his qualms with the creative writing axiom write what you know by pointing out its obvious limitation, that “when we write what we already know, we can only repeat ourselves, and everything, everything we’ve been raised to believe as historical, objective, rational fact.” By wielding a hybrid form that never fully settles into narrative, criticism, lyric, or metatext, Campanioni evades the stale and self-assured, entering a place of uncertainty and intellectual dynamism where hierarchies dissolve and political and social norms are questioned.
Though Campanioni’s book is exhaustively curated and conceptually weighty, its bawdy humor, playfulness, and penchant for uplifting the supposedly “lowbrow” cannot be overstated. Unafraid to discuss exhibitionist fantasies, Kim Kardashian’s anthology of Instagram selfies, or how he attempted to regain a lost sense of smell by “diving [his] face into [his] armpits, [his] crotch …,” Campanioni is fully transparent about his desires and preoccupations, and more than willing to laugh at himself (and the world) along the way. In a favorite section entitled “matt damon’s resemblance,” a Jason Bourne marathon causes Campanioni to reflect on how others have remarked on his Matt Damon-like visage and then on the overlap between spy and writer, two professions that constantly watch, internalize, and subvert. While considering himself and his exile origins through the avatar of Damon’s international spy, he ambles into a funny and poignant story about a Korean immigrant who told his supervisor his name is “sa-jang-nim,” the Korean word for boss. This anecdote, which is only one snippet in an extensive chain of associations, gets at the power of language to destabilize hierarchies and imagine a new order, one in which those who were historically marginal can utilize language and storytelling to take center stage. In Linda Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation, one of her stated goals is to push back on the notion that adaptations are “minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the ‘original,’” encouraging us to see both texts as equals and in dialogic relations with one another. Similarly, Campanioni resists this second-class or marginal status by creating a pseudo-adaptation that does not even attempt to remake its source material; instead, it filters its constituent parts through his experiences, language, and values. He asserts an egalitarian vision where reader and writer (or filmmaker) are equally responsible for making meaning, and where the text becomes a space of cohabitation, allowing him to describe “the experience of stories entering the body” and “tell you what it [is] like to be me.”
The film North by Northwest, like most of Hitchcock’s films, includes a brief cameo of the director in the opening sequence where, after shots of pedestrians streaming down city sidewalks, fighting over taxis, and crossing intersections heavy with traffic, you see him attempt to board a bus whose door slams shut in his face. It’s an ironic moment considering how far Hitchcock is going to take you over the course of the film, from bustling city streets to midwestern cornfields to a climactic scene where the protagonist and villain duel on Mount Rushmore with the founding fathers’ stoic faces in the background. This cameo reminds the viewer of Hitchcock’s authorial presence, that he is staging the action, and is well aware of his audience’s expectations and how he might defy them. Campanioni, in his book, is equally omnipresent and metatextual. He, at one moment, parenthetically reminds us that he still has “not said anything about the film from which the book’s title comes,” that is, aside from describing a scene that was never filmed. He ruminates on his literary and political goals, his syntactical tendencies, as well as the ways that the manuscript itself evolved throughout the process of drafting. Like an auteur director, he even puts this book into conversation with his previous writing, articulating the development of his curatorial style and the diasporic concerns that cut across each of his books. Yet, at the same time, this intense self-focus never descends into narcissism. Campanioni shares himself as an invitation to others, especially those who are marginalized or the children of exiles, to share themselves. Just as he hopes for his students in the section called “what is a title page,” one can tell he wants all of us to take copious notes on what we’re witnessing in the world so that we can find “a moment of resistance, a moment of discovery” and “write [our] lives into the texts that have already been written.”
north by north/west, by Chris Campanioni. Morgantown, West Virginia: West Virginia University Press, May 2025. 238 pages. $22.99, paper.
Anthony Borruso is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Florida. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University, where he served as Poetry Editor for Southeast Review. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Gulf Coast, Frontier, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2024 Louise Bogan Poetry Award, his debut collection Splice was published in July 2025 by Trio House Press.
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