Automaton Biographies

17 Pages·2010·0.336 MB·English

by  Larissa Lai

In her fi rst solo poetry book, Larissa a In Automaton Biographies, Larissa Lai
Lai (author of the novels When Fox is a u machine-tools the poem as a mode of
Thousand and Salt Fish Girl) puts an ear to t narrative invention into a neuro-spatial
o
the white noise of advertising, pop music, surveillance where words become the
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CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology heat tiles of re-entry tumbling through
a
of English Literature, cereal packaging, atmospheres of cyborgian desire, cosmic
t
and MuchMusic as she explores the memory, prosthetic lament, and the
o
problem of what it means to exist on the automaton biographies dictation of identity. Poetry like this is
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boundaries of the human. just what we need for the invasion;

b writing that honours the debris of the
The books consists of four long poems: i imagination while it sustains the space
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“rachel,” a meditation in the voice of the labs of attention.
g
cyborg fi gure Rachel from Ridley Scott’s —FRED WAH
r
fi lm Blade Runner and its source material, a poems
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of p Part exoskeletal enjambment, part
Electric Sheep?; “nascent fashion,” which h shared soft biology, Automaton
addresses contemporary war and its i Biographies wends through creative
e
excesses; “ham,” which circulates around s industries and uncommon commons,
the chimpanzee named Ham sent up into picking up the shards of both our

space as part of the Mercury Redstone latent futures and our Polaroid pasts.

missions by NASA in the 1960s and later Larissa Lai jacks into a sound system

donated to the Coulston Foundation for here that is already spinning everything

biomedical research; and “auto matter,” from White Zombie to Elton John. Her

a kind of unfolding autobiography told in stanzas, staccato and severe, deftly kern
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poems. a our ears to new iTunes and weTunes,
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i creating poems that are simultaneously
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Ambitious and eloquent, these poems s partial, powerful, and ever-emerging
a
taken as a whole are a personal and L from the post-industrial landscapes
cultural history that jostles us out of a where new technologies and alienated
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our humanness and into our relations labor continue to collide.
to animal, machine, language, and one —MARK NOWAK
another.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
arsenalpulp.com
Poetry
$19.95 Canada | $17.95 US
ISBN 978-1-55152-292-0 Larissa Lai
automaton biographies

automaton
biographies
Larissa Lai
Arsenal Pulp Press
Vancouver
AUTOMATON BIOGRAPHIES
Copyright © 2009 by Larissa Lai
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any
form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior
written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief
excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from
Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 200, 341 Water Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6B 1B8
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and
the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Develop-
ment Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book
Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.
Cover illustration by Keith Langergraber
Book design by Shyla Seller
Printed and bound in Canada on FSC-certified paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lai, Larissa, 1967-
Automaton biographies / Larissa Lai.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55152-292-0
I. Title.
PS8573.A3775A87 2009 C811’.54 C2009-903749-1
ISBN, digital edition: 978-1-55152-358-3
four eyes

contents
9 / rachel
43 / nascent fashion
85 / ham
123 / auto matter
165 / acknowledgments

rachel