Getting Ready to Stay Dead examines the uncanny texture of address between impossiblebut necessaryinterlocutors. Chapter I: Where we are is in a sentence, explores the ways in which Jack Spicer and Catherine Wagners correspondence poetics attempts to collocate author and reader, flattening out the supposed hierarchies that exists within acts of cultural creation. Drawing on theories of address within both the epistolary and lyric genres, I argue that in figuring acts of reading and writing as simultaneous and ongoing a correspondence poetics revitalizes not just traditional understandings of how readers encounter the lyric, but the aesthetically and politically transformative qualities of the genre. Chapter II: Getting Ready to Stay Dead, presents a selection of prose and lyric poems composed largely via a self-sent and self-received chain of epistolary emails. The collection intentionally confounds and conflates generic boundaries, as well as questions of who is talking to whom. Asking readers to both occupy and deny the space of the you within them the poems foreground the phenomenologically uncanny experience of you within poetry, or what William Waters refers to as poetics wild spot that makes an accidental reader into the destined and unique recipient of everything the poem contains or is.