Browsing as a Guest

The electric, existential poems in Alicia Hoffman's new book Browsing as a Guest lay bare the complexities and anxieties of existing in the age of the Anthropocene and the rise of intelligent machines. In a world increasingly viewed through the artifice of a screen, where do we look to find meaning? Can language hold the conflicts of our animal nature up to a microscope and reveal what could sustain us? This book reminds us we are all guests in this astonishing, catastrophic world, and the way we browse its contents matters. These are poems that find their lyric balance in the threshold of faith and doubt, bloom and decay, connection and isolation, apocalypse and abundance. Ranging in theme from clickbait to coding to gardening to quarantining, these poems culminate in a collection aware of how quickly the data of our life can be wiped clean. These are poems that don't shirk away from the problems of our world but embrace them. Through the alchemy of the inhabited poetic line these poems transform into something more akin to wonder.  Yes, the world can be overwhelming, Hoffman acknowledges, but this collection also reminds us what a gift it is to be alive.