Lauren Lavín is trying to embrace the boundaries imposed upon life by love and death. But there are distractions: the younger brother she lost to suicide, the friends and ex-lovers who’ve passed, her husband’s illness and fear of dying, her own pull toward the abyss. In The Third Beat, Lavín examines her related impulses to seek, to be seen, to exit the body (through sex, music, alcohol, humor), and to return into it. With liberating scope and candor, Lavín’s short essays consider the ways that we consume ourselves and allow ourselves to be consumed: in grief, in a lover’s eye, in obsessive patterns, in decay, in pursuit of the perfect punch line. And much like comedy’s rule of three, expectations in The Third Beat exist to be subverted. Lavín’s fast and loud prose always renders her existential dread captivating and alive. Rather than answers, Lavín offers pauses at the places our minds are afraid to stop.