My favorite artist books work to relieve me of my readerly preconceptions and instruct new modes of attention, vital work in 2020, a year when reading felt variously impossible. No book did this quite as excitingly, as emphatically, as The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had To Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader. Gins, an artist and conceptualist writer of great experiment and, later, a practitioner of anti-death architecture with her husband, the artist Arakawa, wrote across genre and form—poems, essays, novelistic interventions. The new volume collects six of these texts, including the extraordinary artist-novel, WORD RAIN. In it, Gins writes, “Read this aloud with your voice trailing your eyes: I am reading this aloud.” The second person becomes the first; the writer’s injunctive, the reader’s declaration. The words are a score of themselves. Writer and reader collapse. I am writing this. I am reading. I am here, in my chair, holding WORD RAIN, reading. WORD RAIN facilitates a state of elliptical presence, with Gins guiding the reader out of and then back into themselves. Amid lockdown, anytime—what a gift.