072224

I just finished reading Giant Robot Poems, a new anthology from Middle West Press (www.middlewestpress.com), and it is amazingly good. These poems show Randy Brown's editing skills; there isn't an awkward duckling here. The book is divided into sections: Let Chip the Bots of War!, Soldiers, Pilots, Drones! Lend Us Your Gears!, Demons of Industry, Gremlins of Creation, Building the Better Human, and Flesh and Bone 2.0 Terms of Service. 

I appreciate the multitude of perspectives brought to bear on the subject. Many of them concern the future roles of robots (and drones, cyborgs, etc) in warfare, and most of these were written by poets who are veterans. Many poems here are the work of well-established speculative poets, but others, whose authors' names are unfamiliar to me, seem from the maturity of their writing to be mainstream poets of some experience. If you like robots, possibly even if you don't, there's something for you here. And this book's multifarious thoughtful looks at robot+human society are timely, as we roll towards the day when thoughtful regard becomes a two-way street.

 

From "I Am Human," by Paul Shovlin, on the robot-mediated battle of wits between humanity and itself:

     Sometimes, it's hard to tell if the image has the corner of a crosswalk. Or,

     if a motorcycle counts as a bicycle.

 

From "Ghost Stories and Paramedics," by Shin Watanabe; a look at often-fraught human-robot relationships:

     he dyes his hair blue and ignores me on the streets

     stylishly the cybernetic man/boy falls to his death

     from the bridge over turnpike 82

     I didn't do it

From "Gluxoxgluxoxgluxoxgluxoxgluxox," by J. J. Steinfeld; say what?

     I was at an intersection of historic proportions

     (it had appeared in three sci-fi novels I had read

     at three different times in my all-too-earthbound life)

     when the all-too-human-looking female robot

     leaned in my car window

 
Robots have been imagined in countless forms, and so too our relationships with them. Here's another.

From "Golem," by Abbie Langmead

     i'm sorry

     i do not have the words

     to explain to you why

     i brought you from dust

     only to return you to it.

 

One of the best poetry books I've come across lately.

Disclaimer: I wrote one of the 92 poems.

The book ends with discussion and writing prompts, but I confess I didn't read those. 

ISBN 978-1-953665-30-0.

#robot #SF #poetry