Part autofiction, part sequential critical engagement, the eponymous essay in DREAM OF THE TRENCHES investigates and builds upon narrative recursion, self-reflexivity and subjective treatments of time in modern and contemporary writing. Winding through the work of Ben Lerner, it also addresses Ashbery, Woolf, Stein, Lessing, Mathews, Knausgaard and others. An accompanying sequence of 20 micro-essays--each of exactly 150 words--explores the possibilities of formal constraint with torqued language ranging across topics from beauty to popular music to the senescence of lobsters.