Mike Hranica

Have you ever wondered how people would respond if they could actually read your mind? If you’re like me, the silence of internal quandary feels safe and is generally regarded as such, but there are those outliers where it isn’t so. This seems to be the case with The Devil Wears Prada’s Mike Hranica, who has composed a book of modern poetry and short story accounts that expose his innermost dialogue.

The third release from Hranica, Three Dots and the Guilt Machine is a journal of his everyday musings over an undefined period of time, his way of opening up about the more intimate goings-on that only his inner circle is there to experience. That circle, it would appear, is often suffering and sagging in the curves that should be held up by companionship, interaction and fulfillment. Often, Hranica is the one to blame for such things, admittedly much preferring his own company to that of others as he keeps to his hermetic tendencies. Hranica describes the unsettled loneliness that seems to haunt him through tours and his life on the road; they resolve into the more mundane moments that fit together and create the everyday life many can relate to — despite his decidedly non-mundane vocation.

With it’s very unusual simplicity, Three Dots is an opportunity to see value in circumstances that are often discounted as unimportant. Reading this work feels like hitting the pause button on life and freezing your obligations; it’s a chance to stop, look around and study the little things that have been so long neglected.

In describing this book, his accounts of people-watching are some of the most thought-provoking and interesting views of strangers there can be. It’s a perfect example of his ability to take every day activities and mine them for depth. Common moments like patrons passing in an airport become poetry framed in curious observation. There is an elegance to these passing interactions that replaces the typical dismissal that occurs in the bustle of everyday life.

When time eventually runs out on the book, it leaves behind a sense of wonder at what’s to come, the reader’s lens now reconfigured to examine the minutiae in life. Reading a book with this level of honest thought-purging, it’s difficult not to be thankful for the escape and awareness it affords.