This project began in the summer of 2013, a season of disclosures that revealed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that we were living in the Age of Surveillance. I began reaching out to poets, wondering if some sense could be made of all this. They are, after all, our professional observers. The interest in minutiae, the data of our daily lives, is their business.

Little has changed since that turbulent summer, and the issue of surveillance remains an unsolved and chilling mystery. These four poems wrestle with the ethics of observation, technology, art, and language, “like those invisible stars,” as Harmony Holiday writes, “flickering as soon as you look away.”

– Andrew Ridker

 

SELECTED POEMS

How the Database is Powering the New World Economy by Kent Shaw

Can you read my mind by Harmony Holiday

Rita Duffy: Watchtower 2 by Paul Muldoon

The Future of Writing in English by Jennifer Kronovet

 

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