Baker, Daniel: The Streamers

Spiral Editions, paperback

Publication Date: March 1, 2026

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"I woke at the break of dawn And pressed play, a fleeting thing A thread of time-bound light Drained of a parallel inner life The birds are singing falsely in The eclipsed sky, signals out of time An apparition, a ring, for what Reason does the moon have at all To make demands on me…"

That being "on the Internet" not fifteen years ago meant that one entered a realm, visited it, and left it behind for later is central to the work assembled herein. Yes, we're all "on" now--the ways we opt in and out seem less and less like traditional choices as the information load of the known world (and casual access to the servers of the known world) continues to obliterate the time-space continuum. There's something personal and erotic about the stream and the streamer. Following Whitman: "Through me forbidden voices / Voices of sexes and lusts, voiced veil'd and I remove the veil"--what appears glitched and transmogrified beyond the lace of the veil? These poems are concerned with transmission and signal as much as they're concerned with the packages of invisible information lost through the sieve of online and offline experience. If a physical streamer draped denotes a celebration, a skin a room wears to communicate an event, then these poems show the skin of the world that we know exists, the auxiliary skin grafted upon us. Perhaps we are unaware of its texture. These poems begin a map, a song, which will prove useful. We're all streamers now.

Daniel Baker is a poet from San Francisco who lives in New York City. His work appears or is forthcoming in Annulet, The Baffler, Denver Quarterly, Works & Days, and other publications. He’s the co-editor of Topos Press, the publishing arm of Topos Bookstore in Ridgewood, Qns.