Isabel Boutiette’s PARADISE HD (Spiral Editions, 2024) ventures into unknown territory via Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino’s collaborative conception of a boundless self. The chapbook opens with the following quote from Sight:

This simulacral (willed?) nation would have been a closed (self-defining) system. One might say it had been narrated into paradise.

PARADISE HD wastes no time in introducing us to a dusty, finger-sucking “I”—a drone-like beach-wandering vacuum called AMBER—whose dust bag interior rattles with crab carcasses, oxidized bells, empty cans, and other assorted microplastics. Boutiette aligns her vacuum-speaker with the sensory expertise of a mime: “in the whir sound / REVISIONS of movement / miming your salty finger / in my mouth.” Sand-sucking AMBER spends her days on the mysterious “BEACH” contemplating the differences between a “system” and a “performance” as all-caps WORDS flutter across her forehead:

the SCREEN’s BEACH

is the DRONE’S BEACH

the BEACH, appears not

as system, but

BEACH as the performance of BEACH

light feeds to more light

The way the WORDS repeat throughout AMBER’s mind (or programming?) feels similar to Hilda Doolittle’s own startlingly lucid dreams and recurring visions. Especially her memorable rendering of a ladder in the scene from Tribute to Freud when Doolittle astral projects an image onto a blank wall:

I must hold on here or the picture will blur over and the sequence be lost. In a sense, it seems I am drowning; already half -drowned to the ordinary dimensions of space and time, I know that I must drown, as it were, completely in order to come out on the other side of things (like Alice with her looking glass or Perseus with his mirror). I must drown completely and come out on the other side, or rise to the surface after the third time down, not dead to this life but with a new set of values, my treasure dredged from the depth. I must be born again or break utterly.

AMBER also doesn’t appear to recognize a sky when gazing at the BEACH, but there are “clouds fogging” over a “screen.” If the BEACH is in fact a simulacrum and the sky a screen, perhaps PARADISE HD is about learning how to “break utterly” in order to shatter the screen of a former self. To break with the limits of one’s social environment. To shatter Videodrome-style (i.e. “Long live the new flesh”) and enact “REVISIONS of movement.” This breaking is also reinforced in Boutiette’s glitch-rapid use of enjambment as well:

a metallic form

gelatinous in the Unreal

I’m a type of a paper

I mean

I’m your type, on paper

the poem a possibility

coiling forward

tits first

Boutiette’s title itself posits the idea of clarity as an ultimate, but not necessarily achievable ‘paradise.’ The entire so-called purpose for high-definition television (HDTV) has always been the same: to improve picture quality and to make footage clearer, more realistic, and more immersive. This promise of the imaginary (and its lucrative ties to consumerism) will continue to sell the idea of “paradise” as long as consumer-spectators are prevented from achieving actual immersive experiences in the real world—beyond the screen.

We also eventually learn that AMBER is not just a name, but also a product model. She and a fellow rattling AMBER (“I’m here, there’s only / five others left”) are just two of multiple AMBERS roaming the BEACH’s interface. However, these AMBER models (or products) demonstrate consciousness (“earth so desolate now / that I’m caught / thinking about it”) and a desire for companionship or selfhood (“I’m trying to find my person / this simulation of memory”).

The narrative unfolding of PARADISE HD changes significantly when AMBER’s addressee becomes the ocean shore: “can I steal you for a second?” AMBER steals a jellyfish from the SHORE. The use of the term “SHORE” feels significant. AMBER steals a jellyfish—not from the beach or the ocean—but from the blurred line that divides ocean from beach. In a way, in that moment, the image of a jellyfish takes over. Gives new form to AMBER: “I lived soluble / for so long / a gel sighing / away from / immersion.” From that moment on, the former AMBER appears to be caught in a glitch. Frozen. Forever loading like her fellow AMBERS: “the BOYS are loading / the GIRLS are loading / I am especially loading / in the chlorine ripple again.”

Boutiette’s PARADISE HD puts all its eggs in an amber basket. The endless dialectic between the real and the unreal. Like trying to vacuum a beach. Or desert. Boutiette leaves readers to sift through—see—the mirage for themselves. What is and what appears. A cassette tape sucked from the sand. A salty finger presses “Play.” A song comes on. The sun zeroes in:

And I thought I was mistaken
And I thought I heard you speak
Tell me, how do I feel?
Tell me now, how should I feel?