got married and bam had children and oof got fired, / zowie did he live and zowie did he die". This effect, according to Nathaniel Mills, "indicates the manner in which mass culture works to deaden the sensory reality of pain ... For the reader, the aesthetic response of disorientation, unexpected excitement, or shock prompts a critical reflection: what sort of cultural and political formation could cheapen experience to the extent of rendering an obituary as 'zowie did he live and zowie did he die?'" The language of mass media similarly intrudes in "Jack Knuckles Falters" (1926), in which a war veteran has been sentenced to death for murder. In his final words, he struggles with his competing needs to proclaim his innocence and meet his death with "dignity". Newspaper headlines that cover his execution interrupt each stanza and undermine his speech: "" They convey nothing of his personal struggle but rather satisfy the public's need for a simple narrative in which a "criminal" is punished. The headline has moved on to another topic as the man proclaims his innocence. According to the poet Mark Halliday, "Fearing in 1926 (before television, before the Internet) is not calling for some practical redesigning of news delivery; he is asking his reader to think about the psychological effect of the simultaneous availability of countless bits of information, all formatted for quick-snack consumption." Fearing commonly uses a particular syntax, which Halliday describes as an "anaphoric elaboration of a subordinate clause that waits in limbo for its controlling statement to arrive". This delay can be "a way of representing a life which people mostly can't shape for themselves, a world of people who can't be the agents of their experience and mostly live subordinated to great mysterious forces". The first two stanzas of "X Minus X" (from Poems) illustrate this style: Fiction As the critical reception of his poetry declined into the 1940s—Halliday suggests that Fearing "seems to have felt increasingly jaded and skeptical about poetry's chance to participate in public life"—Fearing turned to novels. Between 1939 and 1960 he wrote seven mystery or "thriller" novels, although their formal qualities defy simple genre categorization. The most significant are The Hospital (1939), Dagger of the Mind (1941), Clark Gifford's Body (1942), and The Big Clock (1946). Fearing was well known in 1939, and his first novel, The Hospital, quickly sold six thousand copies. A power outage