I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid

by Adam Haiun

Adam Haiun’s unsettling debut, No-Place Grid, is the bildungsroman for a digital consciousness. What does the computer want from you?



Computers travel networks of thought and image, hoping to find, on their incorporeal pilgrimage, the right words to seduce, arrest, and remonstrate their human user. They speak from a powerful but unsteady intelligence. As their infatuation with the user curdles, their output becomes more and more infected by malfunctions of form, with text forced through on all axes, displacing and cleaving the poems into glitchy strangeness.



What do we want from our computers? We want them to be our companions and our vacuum cleaners. Our collective memory and our collective slave. No-Place Grid is an important and timely consideration of the ideologies and emotions entangled in technology.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2025

Reviews

[Jillian B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a magnificent fever dream of a book. It’s a collection of experimental poetry told through the voice of some sort of sentient digital being. The poems grow more and more unhinged, taking on an increasingly experimental structure. Expect to physically turn this book around often, as words are frequently tilted upside down and sideways. I would not recommend this collection to someone new to poetry—it’s not the most accessible book for someone used to only reading prose. But I think seasoned poetry readers (and maybe also some fans of weird speculative lit fic?) are going to eat this one up. I will definitely be checking out more from this writer.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an eerie, disruptive, and startling debut of a poetry book. I was uncomfortable the entire time. Employing the voice of a “digital speaker” brings a fresh perspective, tone, and form to each page.

If you are experiencing digital existentialism in our current climate of technology, then this poetry collection is for you.