//Three_last_words -- //Counternarratives -- //Soldier Buffalos: anagrams in trees -- //Husband stories -- //@Code_Switching -- //Zombie nightmare -- //@Tubman's_Rock -- //A new sermon on the Warpland -- //Coming of age stories -- //"Incident".

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In WINTER: EFFULGENCES AND DEVOTIONS, Sarah Vap documents the obstacles to writing a single poem over a twelve-year period. Her account becomes a confrontation with the insidious, radiating, pliant character of late capitalism. She encounters it as a rootless system, an airborne contagion, a toxin in the walls of our homes. Pursuing her distractions across the years, Vap makes certain commitments: to remember the wars that her country is waging, which are meant to be invisible to her; to mourn the deaths of whales by sonar; to hear though she is deaf; to be present for the loss of winter, as she knows it, from earth; and to herself, a profane and multifarious creature who possibly has a soul. Reeling from the nonstop "competition" that sustains the anthropocene's profiteers, Vap offers an unapologetic case study of encroachment, susceptibility, tenderness, porousness and endurance.

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play. A number of the poems are inspired or influenced by a technique of the international literary avant-garde group Oulipo, a dictionary game called S+7 or N+7. This method of textual transformation--which is used to compose nonsensical travesties reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"--also creates a kind of automatic poetic discourse. Mullen's parodies reconceive the African American's relation to the English language and Anglophone writing, through textual reproduction, recombining the genetic structure of texts from the Shakespearean sonnet and the fairy tale to airline safety instructions and unsolicited mail. The poet admits to being "licked all over by the English tongue," and the title of this book may remind readers that an intimate partner who also gives language lessons is called, euphemistically, a "pillow dictionary."

In this engaging, accessible memoir, Charles Hartman shows how computer programming has helped him probe poetry's aesthetic possibilities. He discusses the nature of poetry itself and his experiences with primitive computer-generated poetry programs and — illustrated with sample computer-produced verses — traces the development of more advanced hardware and software. The central question about this cyber-partnership, Hartman says, "isn't exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting." He examines the effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition, concluding that "the tidy dance among poet and text and reader creates a game of hesitation. In this game, a properly programmed computer has a chance to slip in some interesting moves."

An argument that we must read code for more than what it does—we must consider what it means. Computer source code has become part of popular discourse. Code is read not only by programmers but by lawyers, artists, pundits, reporters, political activists, and literary scholars; it is used in political debate, works of art, popular entertainment, and historical accounts. In this book, Mark Marino argues that code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means. We need to learn to read code critically. Marino presents a series of case studies—ranging from the Climategate scandal to a hactivist art project on the US-Mexico border—as lessons in critical code reading. Marino shows how, in the process of its circulation, the meaning of code changes beyond its functional role to include connotations and implications, opening it up to interpretation and inference—and misinterpretation and reappropriation. The Climategate controversy, for example, stemmed from a misreading of a bit of placeholder code as a “smoking gun” that supposedly proved fabrication of climate data. A poetry generator created by Nick Montfort was remixed and reimagined by other poets, and subject to literary interpretation. Each case study begins by presenting a small and self-contained passage of code—by coders as disparate as programming pioneer Grace Hopper and philosopher Friedrich Kittler—and an accessible explanation of its context and functioning. Marino then explores its extra-functional significance, demonstrating a variety of interpretive approaches.

With digital immortality making headlines, stories about robot companions going viral, and crypto upending reality as we know it, it's time to ask: what does it mean to be human in a nearly post-human era? This highly anticipated debut from poet, artist and AI researcher Sasha Stiles captures both the thrill and peril of our intimate relationship with technology, fusing the zero-one rhythms of binary code with the pulse of elegiac couplets in a hybrid text unlike any ever written. Both groundbreaking and heartbreaking, the collection weaves together masterful human verse with captivating language experiments by the author's AI alter ego, alongside full-color photos of Stiles' critically acclaimed art. An urgent investigation of the human condition in a time of profound change, TECHNELEGY is a transhuman manifesto with poetic soul -- and, in the words of leading futurist Martine Rothblatt, "an instant techno-classic." The future of human and machines, and the future of the virtual environment is unravelling fast. Human and machine poetry, a language of shimmering light and sound. Sasha's beautiful poetry evokes the experience of an intimate social gathering, with views on life that make me feel I'm there. Who can pass on that? This is a great read. " A brilliant book--wildly imaginative, playful, smart--the record of a poet grappling with our technological present, and future."--Alan Lightman "TECHNELEGY is an immersive journey into today's entangled web of existence. A fascinating brainbath that leaves the mind inspired, awake and expanded."--Ani Liu "Sasha Stiles' TECHNELEGY is the most comprehensive expression I've seen of our anxiousness for and angst about human-extending technology, as well as its cultural advocacy known as transhumanism. With preternaturally accurate phraseology, and a deft braiding of poetry structures and graphic textuals, Stiles has uniquely managed to create a book of poetry that is as momentous in its reach as are the prospects of AI and digital humanity in theirs. This book will never get old; it is an instant techno-classic."--Martine Rothblatt "The merger between ourselves and our intelligent creations is already underway and will ultimately recreate the nature of everything we hold dear such as life, death, sex, relationships, work and prosperity. Sasha Stiles has fashioned this future scenario into a wonderful series of poems and images that bring the sensitivity of humanity to our transhumanist destiny."--Ray Kurzweil

Stenger alternates his discussions of popular spirituality with a survey of what the findings of 20th-century physics actually mean in laypersons terms--without equations.

Finalist for the New England Book Award From a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional margins Negative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness. For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender. Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.

a slice from the cake made of air processes the physical and mental trauma of abortion coupled with the desires for sexual and emotional love against a backdrop of contemporary culture--with all the sexualization that comes with race, gender, and landscape. From front to back the book is wound through with a single poem whose language is permuted, translated, and retranslated (from English to English) as it cycles around abortion, both asking "what artifact / do I resemble" and stating "small love / small / you failed it / in person." The poems directly confront the sexual self ("This isn't a real orgasm, a real patellar fatigue") and take up the thesis abstract as a malleable form for interrogating the inevitable intersections and overlaps of brains and bodies. Sexy and volatile, a slice from the cake made of air winds over and through itself, with no conclusions or solutions for the mess of living in the world.

A new chapbook of poems by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram