Data Mind: Poems

by Joanna Fuhrman

Wrestling with the experience of living online as a non-digital native

Joanna Fuhrman didn’t grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from “You Won’t Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now” to “We’ll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It,” the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2024

About the author

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry. She teaches poetry at Rutgers University, in public schools and in private workshops.

Reviews

[Nancy]

Buckle up. This is the tumble through who we are that rinses me in orange popsicle water. It feels like fun and games but there's the empty glove I grip with all I've got.

Full disclosure: I met Joanna Fuhrmann at Poets House, where she led an awesome workshop. She jostled us with casual suggestions and walked us around the room to make us really look at stuff (in the kindness way).

[Meg]

The chip Elon Musk installed in my brain is beeping like a smoke detector