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Human Resources Ryann Stevenson

Human Resources By Ryann Stevenson

Human Resources by Ryann Stevenson


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Human Resources Summary

Human Resources: Poems by Ryann Stevenson

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson's Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology's impact on connection and power.

Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don't exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named Nia, who her boss calls his type; she loses hours researching June, an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day trying to break a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson's poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own-where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: I want to say better.

Human Resources Reviews

Praise for Human Resources

Ryann Stevenson's debut collection Human Resources captures the eerie, 'Black Mirror' feeling that we've already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . Stevenson has a deadpan human to counteract the surreality: 'Last night was a first: I screamed out loud / when trying to scream in a dream.' . . . We get the dialogue backward, as in Martin Amis's novel 'Time's Arrow,' in which a Nazi lives his life again from death to birth. Both a nightmare and a fantasy, this undoing. 'I want to go back and change my answer,' Stevenson writes-too late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us.-Elisa Gabbert, New York Times

In Human Resources, the speaker is often isolated, even as she's building technology that's supposed to help connect people. Much of this isolation, the poet conveys, came from [Stevenson] being a woman in a male-dominated industry . . . By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the woman's role in a male-dominated space, she joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation.-NPR's Morning Edition

Here is the past without robot screens, and here is the future that we cannot but try to anticipate through them. It is memorable then, while anticipating, that the person who designs AI throughout Human Resources does not always look at her own screens but, more often, through other windows, with the 'neighbor's TV / flashing silently, / as if he were still awake.'-Ploughshares

Stevenson's darkly comic and unsettling poems reveal the sexism and isolation of Big Tech. But Human Resources explores how our humanity asserts itself - even as we attempt to mimic it in a more perfect replica.-NPR, Books We Love

The lyric explorations in Stevenson's beautifully discriminating book-of self and soul, femininity and society, the peculiarities and intricacies of 'design' within nature and culture-are stunned, fine-minded testimonies. In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability.-Sandra Lim

The controlled anxiety of the present is captured brilliantly by this wary, lucid book. We live in an era when our humanness is worn down-by virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and lead-so we must practice mindfulness to keep from losing track of who we are. This brave, tough book suggests that flowering maples, yoga, orcas, and the hands of our mothers might help us preserve our innocence. Human Resources is a lyric transcript of what it is to be a citizen at a punishing time.-Henri Cole

About Ryann Stevenson

Ryann Stevenson is the author of Human Resources. Her poems have appeared in the Adroit Journal, American Letters & Commentary, Bennington Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, and Linebreak, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.

Table of Contents


CONTENTS



I.

INTERIOR LIFE

BEAUTY MASK

WORK FROM HOME

GROCERY SHOPPING

LISTENING MODE

CLEANING THE POOL

FLOWER

DECISION TREE

YOGA REVOLUTION

II.

THE NEW MIDWEST

EXPOSURE THERAPY

MOBILE

TROUBLE AREAS

HOST

VACATION DINNER

ATTRACTION

ANTICIPATORY DESIGN

DEAR ABDUCTOR

REPLICA

SHEEP

III.

DEEP LEARNING

HUMAN RESOURCES

WELLNESS

BIOLOGICAL CLOCK

INTELLIGENT OVEN

THE VALLEY

FATIGUE

HOUSE CALL

LISTENING MODE

HERE

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Additional information

NGR9781571315182
9781571315182
1571315187
Human Resources: Poems by Ryann Stevenson
New
Hardback
Milkweed Editions
2022-07-28
96
Winner of Max Ritvo Poetry Prize 2021 (United States)
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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Customer Reviews - Human Resources