Critique of Laurel’s “My best friend is going to prison”

The story, through a variation of chronologies, traces the development of the narrator’s friendship with an individual who has recently been arrested for possession, though the charges are apparently debatable.  It offers a wide range of experiments with text, including enjambed lines leading into a dictionary definition, a newspaper article, a single expletive with its own page, text messages and journal entries interrupted by sequential phrases in caps, prison visitation reviews, and instructions for sending mail to inmates.  The rapid change in format successfully reflects the narrator’s anxious uncertainty about how to handle the friend’s fate, but the shift is too drastic to follow at times, especially with the reverse chronology on the second page.  I did enjoy how the piece  forced me to flip between the pages to figure out what was going on, but the ambiguity could be a little more subtle.  Still, this is an interesting piece and is worthy of expanding.