Some of the titles are cute - "The consumer as lonely king", "A short history of thought experiments". Self-doubt (i.e, doubt about the Self - Depersonalisation) merges with worries about the world's fate. Some of the lines are attractive too - e.g.
- "imagining ourselves as dandelion seeds/ history as a summer breeze" (p.11)
- "The shout goes up. It's all about you!/ I'm clutching a cardboard crown. Adverts// tell me it's mine. People suspect me/ of believing it. I'm always tired.// I want to say You've got me wrong./ I know I'm nothing I'm innocent// of being myself" ("The consumer as lonely king")
- "to pollinate the cloud with its emails" ("Hatching")
- "bats tie elaborate knots to parcel up the day" ("Rooftops and moon")
"Pipe & Slippers, New Year's Day, 4pm" rhymes! It's abbaaab ab.
My favourite piece is perhaps “The voice of a generation” in which “We” discover that the poems they most like are AI-generated – “the poems were still very good/ we tried to prove the opposite/ chanting them derisively at each other/ but as fast we explained away their merits/ we found something new in them // we could still have been wrong/ think of the people friends have fallen in love with”
The 2 pages of Notes mention that a poem was in Poetry Review and points out several allusions - e.g. explaining "Good people are doing nothing again".
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