Deep Vellum Publishing, paperback
Publication Date: October 31st, 2023
Publisher Marketing: The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played explore a world that is increasingly mediated through technology; the personal and political struggle for meaning, connection, and reality run like a fever dream through the schizophrenic circuits of television, cyberspace, and virtual existence.
The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played reveal an extremely online persona who finds life IRL challenging. In the reality of these poems, the reader confronts the difficulties and nuances of a world rendered more accessible, more instantaneous, but also more isolating, uncertain, even terrifying thanks to the internet. The speaker faces a social sphere that is bigger, faster, more politically unstable.
Lyricism and personal expression are interlaced with the language and syntax of chat rooms, gamers, e-commerce, in a way that troubles the dividing lines between the human and the inhuman, the authentic and the artificial, the real and the hyperreal. The self morphs into a sequence of failed firewalls and emotions. And yet, the speaker continues questing for answers, for meaning, for connection.
These poems provide an unflinching look at a wired existence, but they never lose their capacity for wonder, feeling, surprise.
