And so, beginning in September of 2020, and carrying on, with occasional interruptions and dilations, until the next April, we read from the first page of J. H. Prynne’s *Parkland* to the last. After that first pass through the nineteen sections, we gathered all the emails and printed them out. In their raw form they told the story of an evolving, dialogic critical encounter, written not from the omniscient vantage of the reader who has got to the last page, but in real time and close to the ground—each linguistic event, as we encountered it, blocking our view of the pages ahead.