Breezy, freewheeling and dangerously funny, Joe Rolnicki’s book of prose poems, The Repeated Hedonist, is a crash course in the hazards of love, work and (post)modern life.

Rolnicki notes that he writes “like Bukowski knocked up Dr. Suess” and that Madame Galaxy has given him permission “to do the thing that keeps you up at night, when you go dumb and think big.”

Indeed, Rolnicki can “think big”: In “The Non-Entrpreneur,” he writes: “Our ancestors could have opted for nude colonies and mud shelters but instead we invented insurance commercials so now I have to learn about cryptocurrency and what streaming service defines me as a person when all I want to do is look at the nighttime sky and talk about the cool frog I saw yesterday.”

That meld of whimsy, wonder and irony is one of the collection’s strengths. The book is compulsively quotable, page after page, delivering word play that resonates: “I know the difference and you were the difference”; “I get all bloom and doom”; “We read each other’s collar bones like braille.”; “The only difference between me and a leech is a set of limbs.” And there’s much more.

Still, this isn’t always a light, easy read. Rolnicki bares his heart in often grim, lurid detail. The work can be raw —drenched in alcohol, sex and dark-night-of-the-soul ruminations that veer wildly into the down and dirty, as in a wonderfully obscene piece where Rolnicki describes his “first date with a Capricorn Siren,” which goes from “3AM. We’re still talking with all of our clothes on” to “5AM. She sprays my sheets with her squirt. 6AM. I cover her tits with my cum.”

In other words, this isn’t for youngsters or the faint of heart. For the rest of us, though, this is a compelling read: a spreadsheet for a gig economy of jouissance and trauma where the pain, loss and misery is re-coded into rueful smiles and insights.