Description
Wrestling with the experience of living online as a non-digital native
Joanna Fuhrman didn't grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from "You Won't Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now" to "We'll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It," the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated.
Product Details
| Publisher | Curbstone Press |
| Publish Date | October 15, 2024 |
| Pages | 96 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780810147744 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.1 X 0.3 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
JOANNA FUHRMAN is the author of six previous poetry collections, most recently To a New Era. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, The Slowdown podcast, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and a coeditor of Hanging Loose Press.
Reviews
"This book is one of the few that not only faces, but incorporates, what is "brand new" in our culture and how it has changed language and the way we process information. Data Mind is a representation of how our perceptions of language and meaning have shifted from the page to the screen, and how that screen has morphed into multiple psychedelic worlds." --Los Angeles Review
"Many questions in this poetry would have felt like science fiction a generation ago, aiming directly at our evolution alongside technology in a way that will itch your ear long after reading." --CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
"Joanna Fuhrman's Data Mind braves through the minefield of social media, our individualism heightened, flattened, and eventually erased as we post selfies and search for community. Instead we find clickbait, bots, the dark web, and ChatGPT in these surreal prose poems that take on the shape of our phones and computer screens, the boxes we put ourselves in and then try to punch out of. Fuhrman's monitors are an eerie update to Baudelaire's "Windows"--Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is the real one?" Data Mind is gorgeous and complex, an important book for the digital age."--Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout
"Fuhrman weaves together lyrical moments and moving prose that echo with emotional resonance as they speak to the confusion, cruelty, and strange beauty of life on the Internet. Memorable, surprising, and beautiful, Data Mind brings new and genuine light to questions of womanhood, the internet, and the liminal spaces between them." --Lucy Biederman, author of The Walmart Book of the Dead
"Fuhrman's poems attach a pop, everyday smile to the larger issues that keep her reflections honest and far from sentimentality or pompousness -- a delicate balance of humor, subtlety, and punch. Her sparky, surreal images bubble over with bright enthusiasm that often carries a sly sarcasm in her back pocket. There's aways a slice of self-critique nearby to get her out of a tight corner and reset the coordinates; arrows stick out of every angle/orifice, so her scalpel-like incisions into the body politic come with a playful, Carroll-esque glimpse into the other side of the mirror where, if you look closely, you can see there's a party going on." --Charles Borkhuis, author of Rearview Mirror
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