Automaton Biographies

by Larissa Lai

Poetry about the search for self amidst the shrill din of technology.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, Literature, Canada

ebook

First published October 1, 2009

About the author

Larissa Lai has authored three novels, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl and When Fox Is a Thousand; two poetry collections, sybil unrest (with Rita Wong) and Automaton Biographies; a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement; and a critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award, she has been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.

Larissa was born in La Jolla, California and grew up in St. John's, Newfoundland. She spent the 1990s as a freelance writer and cultural organizer. Her first publication was an essay about Asian Canadian contemporary media, published in the catalogue for the 1991 exhibition Yellow Peril: Reconsidered. She has held writer-in-residence positions at the University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University and the University of Guelph. In 2001, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. From 2001-2006, she did a PhD in English at the University of Calgary. She was Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at UBC from 2007-2014. In 2014, she returned to the University of Calgary to take up a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing.

She likes dogs, is afraid of cats, and feels at home in both Vancouver and Calgary.

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. Conceptually, this was a brilliant work, but the execution didn’t always land with me.

[boocia]

good! a real poet's poetry collection though; in that it is v dense and complex and self-referencing in that way where i read this book twice because it really isn't linear in some ways. breathtaking density+consistency of wordplay. a sample: "oh brother artful art thou / seeking the how of our connection / only to understand yourself / shelf shakespeared not stirred / ... / telltale heart beating in surrogate body / your innocent double / frank-n-furtive".

it's fun, it's pretty delicious, but i struggled because a lot of these call backs are v culturally contextualized - references to movies or historical moments i don't have the full 'vibe' of and so it's difficult to see where the poem is going above "oh, i recognize this reference by name". especially an issue in the fourth poem section "auto matter", which is autobiographical + family history.

the other stylistic choice that i liked was verbing nouns, especially in the first poem, 'rachel'. it causes this pleasing but also running-out-of-breath tumbling effect where there are no places to pause: "i athena my own sprouting / this knowledge colds me / ... / i owl my blink".

style aside the contents of this poetry book were really cool! 'rachel' was about rachael in blade runner, and it weaved a narrative of a human-android hybrid but also chinese-white hybrid rachel, twinning the two identities. 'nascent fashion' was this really discombobulating meditation on imperialism + migration + asian sex workers all at once, rough one, but very tight and focused. 'ham' was great. it was about the chimp named 'ham' who went to space, and had my favorite line of this collection: "fleas i'd groom off your arms / if i were i". this one felt most explicitly like praxis to 'primate visions' theory; about the existential position of chimps and animals generally; about the medicalization/scientific-exploitation of bodies; the cyborgization of ham specifically as an object of study and an agent of research, etc. good one. just good impressions all around from 'ham'.

i did struggle with 'auto matter'; which was about larissa lai's family history from her great great grandparents down to her, and specifically the effect of: "if the communists hadn't liberated / if the british hadn't colonized / if mccarthy hadn't scared", and also: "between imperial japanese lines of attack and british colonial defense / read silence to find family" . which i think defines the project to some degree; diaspora history poems are really memory poems; and it seems her take is to really lean into the war and displacement and revolution (big historical moments) for memory, which is really the best you can do other than speculate about how your grandparents were feeling at the time. she approached trauma only obliquely, did not steal as her own any trauma from her relatives, which i appreciated. i do like how she has a few poems in this section that are specifically about the concept of memory/the subconscious to lampshade this fact, and interpolates poems about her great-great-grandparents fleeing to taiwan from (??) with her own memories of growing up in canada.

anyway i don't know if i'd recommend this book if you aren't committed to the bit; it's p incomprehensible unless you're patient + diligent, but i did glean a few nuggets here and there so that was good.

[Stephanie Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

"we're petty like this / fox lady haunts cricket grounds / sly civility mimics (life) / clutching ancestral excess / while the mainland scraps / three ways" – "yee sup look," from AUTO MATTER

all I can really say after reading this is wow…wow at how larissa lai writes between animal, machine, and human so well in each of the four sections of the collection…wow at her fluidity, and how if you squint at RACHEL (written from the POV of the replicant from Blade Runner) her words fall across the page better than any AI generated chat text could capture the character's spirit…wow at the precision of the memories and lives and feelings that she evokes even in the absence of formal sentences or any other recognizable structural formatting…a very good read! much to think about! my head is swimming now (in a good way)

side note but I also loved the fact that AUTO MATTER was segmented by transliterated Cantonese words and numbers! I have not read Cantonese on the page as far as I can recall and it has been a while since I've had the opportunity to speak the language…in such a way, the end of the book felt like coming home in a new sense :)

"my heart exudes a kind of love / a kind of mourning" – from RACHEL

[Roo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I generally do not enjoy poetry unless it is composed by Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, or Edgar Allan Poe. I have always been more of a novel person - I live for the kind of character development, plot advancement, and complex messages that comes with reading a book. So to summarize, my fondness for poetry is very limited. That being said, I really disliked "Automaton Biographies." I think this piece would have worked better as personal musings to be kept to oneself. Again, I admit I am simple-minded when it comes to poetry, but it just seemed like a majority of the poems were only relatable to a small audience. That being said, I did appreciate the section of the collection dedicated to telling the immigrant narrative. It offered a unique lens to a story shared by so many human beings. While I have reiterated many times my views on poetry, I am all-in-all glad I got to experience such an individualistic collection of poems, as it definitely broadened my poetic horizon!

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

he noirs his murders
long coat big gun
a kiss is just a bullet wound
he knows my innermost
femming this fatal injury

- pg. 22

* * *

bang bang
chop chop chang

up in a rocket
what a man

- song, pg. 89

* * *

haven is relative
"god's her own father
and she don't even believe in 'im"
our lady of lourdes
romances another place, not here

- say, pg. 128

* * *

forces of hystery slap our asses
to the shopping mall
shirt a dress
a rolex watch
balms fetish to calm
the open-jaw ticket

- yee sup gow, pg. 155

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this up for a book vs film library program about Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, specifically to bring the poem "rachel" into the discussion. Written from the ridley scott character's perspective, it's a pretty poignant meditation on being (or not being, seen as) human.
What I loved most in this collection, though, is "nascent fashion." I read it as headlines discuss climate crisis, perpetual war, etc. and it absolutely tore me apart - something i want in a poem in moments like this.
Would recommend, esp for sci-fi fans.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

13 ‘i dream an ethic
pure as lieder
pale as north
moth before industrialization’

53 ‘am i a girl dreaming i’m in a truck
or a truck dreaming i contain a girl?’

119 ‘new cultural politics of intimacy
i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
birds of a flu fish of a feather’

143 ‘the rusted car
how did it get there?
even then its machine-ness
half undone
fog rushes to return it
to forest’

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the first collection o f poems that were written about blade runner. I found the film running before my eyes as I read it. Although Lai's skill with words is still so present in this collection I was not as drawn to the poems in this collection overall. The structure of the poems did not seem to match for me the texture of her words.

[Paul]

Review at asianamlitfans (cross-post from Galatea Resurrects).