Humanoid is Joel Craig’s second book, after 2012’s The White House. For this new book, Craig challenged himself to jettison all his old tricks and come up with a new way of writing. Humanoid presents the result of his experiments: an expanded lyric form that drifts across the page, moving between direct discourse and the outer limits of hipster cosmology.
Joel Craig is the author of HUMANOID (2021) and THE WHITE HOUSE (2012), both from the Green Lantern Press. He co-founded and hosted the Danny's Reading Series in Chicago from 2001-2015 and serves as an artistic associate for the LitLuz festival (litluz.org) and poetry editor for MAKE literary magazine.
I don't know how to describe a bunch of poseurs thus the word poseur roger that most assuredly (26)
to have a collective social assumption you know trying to figure out to whom are you really writing good morning ladies you dads think you're all so funny combatting toxic masculinity with cheerful humility (31)
I think fighting and opposing is a spiritual trap if you meet evil with hate you lose okay I get it (56)
you know how people rid themselves of agony by putting agony into someone else (67)
this era excels so much at a certain situational absurdity that it never seems to recognize a uniquely magical experience (69)
no matter how inspired we are we are bound to have moments where ambition exceeds technique you open a door only to ifnd another door and another until you find the people who park their money in absurdity (79)
the thing about movies is that some day no one will be around to marvel at the absurd expense of their creation in the midst of so much need (91)
almost all Barry White records are under five bucks and they are all good but sitll they don't sell well don't people fuck anymore (117)
I want to get as close as I can to understanding not just the human mind but the mind of God and I want to be able to live with what I find (168)
Poems that observe the interplay of cognition and the social, staging their thought in atomic syntactical units floating across the page that sometimes glimmer in each other's back light. Through this they think w/a rare precision in framing the exact moments where propositions transform or change direction. Will return to this one.