Close Encounters of the 21st Kind by Joanna Fuhrman
An author-made videopoem by Joanna Fuhrman,
an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University [who] is the author of six books of poetry, To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015), Pageant (Alice James Books 2009), Moraine (Hanging Loose Press 2006), Ugh Ugh Ocean (Hanging Loose Press 2006) and Freud in Brooklyn (Hanging Loose Press 2000). In 2011, Least Weasel published her chapbook The Emotive Function. Her seventh book Data Mind, a collection of prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press in October 2024.
Read the rest.
“Close Encounters…” is from that forthcoming collection, Data Mind. Fuhrman told me,
In this collection, I wrestle with the experience of being online as a non-digital native. My generation entered the Internet age with a lot of optimism about the possibility of a new kind of community and has watched with anguish as what was sold as a utopian space has instead reflected and magnified all of the horrors and anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. Still, the Internet can be fun. Some of the joy and the feeling of connection is real. I am interested in exploring these simultaneous and conflicting realities. I use the trope of the Internet as a way to remix the stories of famous films as well as a way to examine the ancient tension between the mind and the body. The book also tackles how gender stereotypes are either exaggerated or erased in Internet culture.
I’ve shared a couple of Fuhrman’s other films, but do visit Vimeo for more.
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Dave Bonta is a poet, editor, and web publisher from the Appalachian mountains of central Pennsylvania.
Terrific selection. Thank you.
This is so great. The poem is fantastic, what a killer last line, and works brilliantly with the visuals and sound.
Thank you so much for sharing. I love MOVING POEMS, and use it a lot for teaching.
Here’s the link to the book the poem is from, forthcoming in October. If you use the CODE PRIDE, it’s 40 percent off in JUNE.
Poem from Data Mind.
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810147744/data-mind/
Data Mind (forthcoming Oct 15th)
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.
Thanks! I’ve edited the post to include the order link.