Zoë Hitzig’s newest, called Not Us Now, is a collection of poems written against—into the teeth of—the particular kind of algorithmic society many of us are now ensnared in. A society in which our moves are tracked and goaded by corporate systems for guiding behavior and feeling. Which makes for a culture of trending and buzzing, immediacy, and profitable smoothness. Hitzig offers a vision for another, freer, wildly alive, and compelling use for the power of numbers. Which is to say, she uses the language of our society against it, to unmake and remake it in the imagination. Here, for instance, is the lyric power of “Greedy Algorithm”:
Is this or is this not
what you tasked me with.
To play our every hand.
To replace each arrival with
the nearest destination.
To keep you in what may
still be called breath.
Cliffs, ropes, pills, wings …
it’s not like you specified
any real alternatives.
The failure of imagination is not the algorithm’s fault but, as always, dear Brutus, in the imaginations that imagined it. So the poem finishes:
