“Blow,” the less-than-two-page-long opener, speaks to a disconnect between mind and body. The first sentence stretches, forming a 14-line-long paragraph littered with commas that reads like a mix between a prose poem and weighty musical lyrics. The subject, however, is quite simple: A man calls a phone-sex line and awaits fulfillment of his specified request, but gets a dose of reality instead. The girl tells him about a series of storms that drifted through on her way to work, triggering a too-human reaction. In the last story, “Likewise, Rise Up, All You Angels of Disquiet,” a nervous, paranoid man calls a “hot” line over and over during his aimless travels across the country. But when he calls, the girl is always asleep. Dew is plenty familiar with isolation at work.

“For a while, I worked in Evanston at this market-research firm,” he says. “I was in one of those big rooms, we’re all in cubicles, we’re all on the phone, we’re surrounded by mirrored walls. And we know, for a fact, that for at least 15 minutes of each shift, one of our bosses will be listening in, unbeknownst to us, and making sure that we’re reading exactly from the script.”

This sort of numbness appears again in “Cervical Days,” a story about a woman who is diagnosed with cervical cancer. Told from her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s point of view, the story follows her decline and panic, until she uncovers a secret about her ailment. And in “The Disaster Addict,” the main character yearns for violence but won’t leave his house. He constantly listens to the radio, waiting for disaster to strike, but usually hears only smooth jazz and light rock, while answering market-research phone surveys and receiving junk mail.

Dew, who writes regularly for Chicago Artists’ News, interweaves visual, performative art into some of his stories. In “The Thing With Feathers,” a man relates the story of his brother who was “not yet dead of AIDS” back during a time when the disease was new: “He stopped talking and sat in a chair, waiting to die. I became a performance artist and shat a complete diorama of the Last Supper, figure by figure.”

But while reading the book, a sense of apathy, fear and paranoia becomes clear—an ironic twist for a book purportedly about insurgency. For Dew, that’s part of the act of writing.

“I think you can write a story where, in fact, the characters don’t take action and it’s about inaction, but the very presence of story as story testifies to an alternative to that,” he says. “And I think for the reader, it’s not like ‘I should be apathetic and not take action.’ There’s some sort of thrust to it; they see the world more clearly and respond accordingly.”

Dew reads Saturday 8 at The Book Cellar and Tuesday 11.