Blocks World

by Emma Catherine Perry

Blocks World by Emma Catherine Perry is a stunning collection of poems exploring the intimate and fraught relationships among Artificial Intelligence , the natural world , and family . Combining formally inventive poems with classic lyricism, Blocks World is both deeply human and deliriously extra-human. Giving voice to the "desire to be known and the pain of being unknown / by those you love the most" Blocks World announces the arrival of a stunning new talent. At once playful and ambitious, self-assured and vulnerable, these poems grapple with the thorny entanglements binding computers , plants , animals, and people together. The poet interrogates a "If I don't kill you / will you kill me? If I don't kill you will you live / like a coiled idea in the ground?" Observing her partner across "an abundance of onions" the poet tries and fails to imagine he is "just some guy / in a grocery store / who means nothing to me." Perry asks her computer how the self survives itself, and the computer "it might not be as far-fetched as it seems." "While reading these poems, I thought the word alarming , and then wondered, do I mean disarming ? No, alarming . ("If I don't kill you will you live / like a coiled idea in the ground? // If you kill me will you mourn me?") Blocks World , built around two long, beautiful poems that pump life through the book like hearts or lungs, is an uncanny, fiercely inquisitive collection about nature and technology, sisters and fathers, pain and evil. Here there is "nowhere to live but the land of the self," a "soft apocalypse"; here the self is an alien intelligence, "a bloodful machine." - Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory "Emma Catherine Perry's Blocks World defies description. This book is an abandoned factory that melts down loneliness and want and arid distances to produce - mysteriously! - abiding love. It's a tangled ethical problem around agency and pain where the fact of suffering is both unknowable and inevitable. It's a joke passed between sisters, between father and daughter, speaker and reader, yearning for connection, consoling and complicating in equal measure. It's a crackling circuit board, a series of inputs and outputs, a computer's elliptical dream. Blocks World is an irreducible brilliant, funny, unsettling, and entirely original. A virtuosic debut." - Edgar Kunz, author of Fixer "'How can I talk to the people I love' is the urgent question at the core of Emma Perry's bracing debut. Her poignant lyric meditations confront her father, mother, and sister as the central others around whom her sense of self revolves―and dissolves. The obsessive, elusive conundrums framing her family galvanize further epistemicand ontological How can I know you, and how will I know if you know me? If 'the things we share divide us,' where do I leave off and you begin? What or whereis pain, or joy, and what difference, if any, falls between 'grieving / and delighting'? Equally concerned with the sentience of nonhuman actors, from the zoological to the artificially intelligent, Perry is a "bloodful machine" who runs her empathy through various types of color coding and cluster analysis, trying to feel feeling. As if interfacing with Augustine, 'I know what my problem is,' she says. And yet." - Andrew Zawacki author of Unsun

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Paperback

Published September 19, 2023

Reviews

[Cory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often struggle with poetry and verse, but these poems held me rapt from the first lines. A few pages in, I knew this would become a book I will read and reread countless times (also very rare for me). The language is vivid, emotional, inquisitive and intimate and every page holds a small revelation. Going on my nightstand so it will always be close at hand for a few pages or a full read through.

[Julia Hannafin · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’ll reread this book many times! it’s searching and it’s skeptical of what searching can actually do for someone and their relationships— the writing is defining and redefining its terms but without rigidity, instead operating from some place that is real and unwieldy and emotional. i loved it. it made me think about my family and my connections with everything. with nature, with myself, with certainty.

“I keep not finding the answers to me with others
nor the answer to others with me.
These rooms keep opening into each other.”

[Hannah Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perry's Blocks World is a spiral. I lost and found myself in it.

[Becca Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the frequent reordering of 'blocks' and how it changes the narrative.

The two main relationships explored throughout felt palpable and real, though I couldn't quite relate.

[jorjor wel · Rating 4 out of 5]

an incredibly compelling piece of science fiction that reminded me of don hertzfeldt's world do tomorrow trilogy