Colin Rafferty's Execute the Office uses lyric prose and formal invention to explore the humanity, or lack thereof, that thrived in each of the forty-five American presidents. Whether these powerful individuals were celebrated for infamous deeds and heroism, or forgotten as placeholders in the annals of American history, too often presidents are commemorated by the sterility of simple fact. Execute the Office builds upon factual accuracy with essays that are equally invested in lyricism and experimental forms. To balance these factions, Execute the Office uses constraint, metaphor, allusion, and epiphany to explore not just the facts and artifacts of history, but describe the connections between those facts and human nature. These essays discuss the modes in which we remember through death songs, footnotes, infinite rooms, evacuation routes, and nomenclatures, to name a few examples, engaging with history from fresh perspectives. Execute the Office contains histories in and of unusual objects. While unfamiliar at first, they soon become distinct, unforgettable, profound, human.

Most books about the presidents are either biographies or political science tomes, hundreds of pages long. If they cover the full list of presidents, then they often devolve into lists of trivia. Execute the Office seeks to balance both halves of the creative nonfiction genre by writing succinct essays that are invested as much in lyrical writing and experimental forms as they are with factual accuracy.