NMLCT

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Poetry that explores our “post-truth” society, NMLCT holds up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm.

“Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection, and this book is a blistering mourner’s lament: audacious, brutal, compassionate, and darkly ecstatic. ‘What on earth,’ he asks, ‘has happened here, and when? Who is the astronaut and who is the ape?’” — Stuart Ross, author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

Fables and fairy tales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn’t, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a “post-truth” society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of “real life” still exists.

All precisely 16 lines long — identically formed as though mass-produced — these poems are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.

AUTHOR

Paul Vermeersch

Paul Vermeersch is a poet, professor, artist, and editor. The author of five previous collections of poetry, including The Reinvention of the Human Hand, a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, and Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something, he teaches in the Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College and is senior editor at Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he runs the Buckrider Books imprint. He lives in Toronto.

Reviews

NMLCTs assured diamondknife vision is better described as augural than speculative Every word is well chosen every pixel assertive on this atlas to worlds that are at once obscure and familiar It is an elegant ultimatum Its poetry is stretched taut between metaallegory and instruction manual for seeking finding and reforming the self It calls us to denounce the ambivalent bevelled and algorithmic recursion of machine thought It invites us to travel through rebellion and transition to transfiguration to emerge rewilded and rearrangeda gift the best books leave us with Youll want to go back immediately Tolu Oloruntoba author of The Junta of Happenstance and Unravel

Paul Vermeerschs beguiling NMLCT articulates both common despair and the resilience of hope Anchored by form and a keen sense of rhythm these ambitious poems depict fantastical worlds that mirror the disorientation of our increasingly unbelievable landscape Annick MacAskill author of Shadow Blight and Votive

NMLCT is the corner weve backed ourselves intoand perhaps a map out of it This is an essential book an avalanche of compressed fairy tales for our time Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection and this book is a blistering mourners lament audacious brutal compassionate and darkly ecstatic What on earth he asks has happened here and when Who is the astronaut and who is the ape Stuart Ross author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky

Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology this collection furthers a growing and intriguing thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry Vermeerschs poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present of where this all might be heading rob mclennans blog

In NMLCT Vermeersch creates a multimedia experience that mirrors the hybrid nature of contemporary digital life The reader must navigate text image and code much as we navigate our daily digital environments The poems argue for the irreplaceable value of human consciousness intuition and embodied experience in an age increasingly dominated by algorithmic thinking NMLCT reminds us that the animal city however threatened remains our true home The Seaboard Review

NMLCT encourages us to make new thoughts new connections new poems amidst the old abandoned computer code and madetosell cheap design work amidst the glitches of background machine noise These spellbinding poems at once allusive and engaging are portents wards against the artificial intelligence and misinformation we find so much of our modern lives are now mired in but they are also I think signposts maps for finding our way back out through words to our genuine selves The Woodlot