Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen

by Rachael Crosbie

This deeply badass poetic manifesto of teenhood in a lawless virtual landscape makes use of all the internetisms you knew and loved to ms-paint a vivid picture of queer coming-of-age experience through the e-graveyard of MySpace that’s been resurfacing from the soil as hyperpop and trauma.

47 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2022

Reviews

[Rachel Stempel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most striking about this collection—beyond the command of language I’ve come to expect of Rachael Crosbie’s work—is its obsession with form, how words occupy the page becoming as important as the words themselves. We move seamlessly from the centered text experiments of “Playing with Polly Pockets or a Poltergeist” to the more traditional left-aligned “The Sims: Making’ Magic or Your First Time Dissociating” to “Your Diary Entry as a Yahoo! Answers Question”, which utilizes textboxes to mimic the platform—all within the first 10 pages. We’re made to feel as if we can’t keep up, a sentiment that drives these poems’ speakers from site to site in search of a self that both acknowledges and transcends the traumas of real life—“again and again/ and again”.

Like a trick mirror, these visual elements (and the soul-searching connotations of poems with titles like “What Kind of Vampire Are You?” or “Who is Your Werewolf Dopplegänger?”) cannot be trusted. These poems demand layered interrogation, sifting through shared signs between reader and speaker to piece together vignettes of early internet-informed adolescence.

[Ami J. J. Sanghvi · Rating 5 out of 5]

TRICK MIRROR OR YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN not only serves up some much-needed. scene-kid, y2k nostalgia on a platter of old-school Hot Topic $20 emo band tees, but simultaneously leaves the angsty 2000s child in us all feeling deeply nourished in the face of our current, increasingly-draining dystopian realities. As a more recent fan of Crosbie's work and a proud co-founder of the resident "MySpace disaster press," I found TRICK MIRROR OR YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN to be the exact dose of queer, holographic 2000s nostalgia I didn't realize I so desperately needed. These poems invoke everything from the horrors of 4th grade mean girls with their immaculate Bratz dolls to the magic of truly vintage Paramore. The vibe here is a world of deeply pixelated, early joy-revival Avril Lavigne H O T P I N K <3 combined with the smooth, rubbery smell of a brand new Polly Pocket and the gentle thrill of glitching one's way through The Sims Bustin' Out on Nintendo Gamecube. Moreover, Crosbie's poems function on several levels: as a series of love letters to another era, an intimate playlist for the lost, flailing 2000s child in us all, and even a bottle of lyrical medicine for the present-day young adult who was raised on a lethal diet of deception and infinite broken promises. In summation, TRICK MIRROR OR YOUR COMPUTER SCREEN embodies the passionate, heartbreaking, millennial longing for a time so-long gone it feels nothing short of ethereal, and is set to be among the best poetry releases of 2022.

[alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way form is played with in this chapbook provides a weirdly poetic sense of coming-of-age in the 2000s. The structure of each poem felt so intentional and made it interesting to read because you can never expect how 2000s internet speak and pop culture will manifest in the next poem and what themes of growing up and trauma will be dealt with. This is a must-read for fellow young millennials/zillennials.

[Robin Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crosbies work is amazing and holds so many spaces for new and different meanings beyond the straightforward point, however, getting through this collection was difficult. Personally, the descriptive language was too broad for me to understand and left me more confused than anything. I enjoyed listening to the poems be read aloud instead, as I was able to grasp them better.

[Melissa Dunlap · Rating 5 out of 5]

The forms here are so mind-bending and remind me of what it was like as a teen on the Internet. The descriptions and imagery were so hyper-specific, yet relatable all at once.