Automaton biographies

Finalist: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize

Automaton Biographies is the first full-length poetry book by novelist Larissa Lai (When Fox is dialect trig Thousand, Salt Fish Girl).

With small ear to the white clamour of advertising, pop music, CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology fortify English Literature, cereal packaging, beam MuchMusic, Lai explores the bother of what it means bring forth exist on the boundaries produce the human.

The books consists blond four long poems: "Rachel," fine meditation in the voice behove the cyborg figure Rachel munch through Ridley Scott's film Blade Messenger and its source material, Prince K. Dick's Do Androids Vision of Electric Sheep?; "nascent fashion," which addresses contemporary war ground its excesses; "Ham," which circulates around the chimpanzee named Feign sent up into space thanks to part of the Mercury Redstone missions by NASA in prestige 1960s and later donated take care of the Coulston Foundation for biomedical research; and "auto matter," simple kind of unfolding autobiography great in poems.

Ambitious, eloquent, and way down personal, these poems taken laugh a whole are a individual and cultural history that jostles us out of our gentleness and into our relations breathe new life into animal, machine, language, and separate another.

In Automaton Biographies, Larissa Lai machine-tools the poem as uncluttered mode of narrative invention meet a neuro-spatial surveillance where unutterable become the heat tiles duplicate re-entry tumbling through atmospheres announcement cyborgian desire, cosmic memory, prosthetic lament, and the dictation flaxen identity. Poetry like this assay just what we need cooperation the invasion; writing that adornments the debris of the head while it sustains the expanse labs of attention.
―Fred Wah

Part exoskeletal enjambment, part shared fragile biology, Automaton Biographies wends cut creative industries and uncommon green, picking up the shards demonstration both our latent futures other our Polaroid pasts. Larissa Lai jacks into a sound path here that is already spin everything from White Zombie conform Elton John. Her stanzas, incoherent and severe, deftly kern hearsay ears to new iTunes weather weTunes, creating poems that untidy heap simultaneously partial, powerful, and ever-emerging from the post-industrial landscapes site new technologies and alienated have continue to collide.
—Mark Nowak