Because You Previously Liked or Played

<b>The poems in <i>Because You Previously Liked or Played</i> 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.</b><p>The poems in <i>Because You Previously Liked or Played</i> 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>These poems provide an unflinching look at a wired existence, but they never lose their capacity for wonder, feeling, surprise.</p>