In her vertiginous second collection, Zoë Hitzig delivers an astonishing act of ventriloquy in reverse – speaking not through the voice of a singular, lyric “I,” but through a consciousness that seems to have amassed itself out of the detritus of human life. The future world of Not Us Now is remembered in an even further future, where language is both the survivor and the cargo of an earthly wreckage. Crushed under the weight of collection and storage, what remains are those records of human curiosity, habit, and longing which have increasingly formed the information economies of the present. What are we doing to language and ourselves as we extract more and more material for questionable optimization? What will the appetite of a controlled, controlling public erode from the private? Across a series of elliptical, siren-like poems and sequences, Hitzig performs an urgent lyric intervention, recovering defiance from our accumulating raw-data footprints. With equal measures of method and entropy, Not Us Now presents the chorus we are hurtling toward, our own voices in the future issuing a plea for a new course.
ZOË HITZIG is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020) and Not Us Now, winner of the Changes Book Prize (Changes, 2024). She currently serves as poetry editor of The Drift.
PRAISE FOR NOT US NOW
“There was no need to dream it; I could feel my organic machine taking in each of Zoë Hitzig’s remarkable poems through my eyes, processed with the algorithm of breath into an epiphany. Imagine a book that can spur transfiguration; it is in your hands!”
–CACONRAD, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
“Can a variable dream? Can a person not dream? Hitzig’s lyric algorithms lead us, step by step, toward deepening mysteries of identity and existence. Let’s not forget that her variable ‘o’ also functions as the grammatical particle of poetic invocation. O Muse, O Rose, O Death—it’s an ancient way to address something beyond the human.”
–SRIKANTH REDDY, author of Underworld Lit
“In Zoë Hitzig’s stunning collection Not Us Now, algorithms are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Our likes, preferences, and upvotes transform our passions and personalities into products exchanged in commerce. These lyrical poems detangle and interrogate algorithmic structure and power, asking us to not ‘forget that spending spent you,’ and to remember that the plottable points constructing a line are not the whole story, are not life or the rehearsal for life. In these poems algorithms mean relationships, memories, entangled variables. Algorithms require algebra, and in poems lush and voracious, Hitzig grants us a language for how these tricky systems work to tether us to one another.”
–LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM, author of Negative Money
“With twists of sonic play & dead-pan meaning, Hitzig builds an inhabited, observed, measured, loved & studied world into these poems. Something ominous hovers somewhere between observer & calculation, between past & future, she writes ‘I/ climb/ I/ max/ I/ min/ I/ am/ the/ wren/ that/ metes/ the/ dawn’— we are caught somewhere in causal trajectories of becoming & negating, self & other, an algorithmic comingling as animal calculates world as world becomes—. Here we find ourselves in real places, troubled by their own hard world-ness & by the being-of-us-in-them & we find ourselves, by troubled language, making our difficult way through, as ‘Heavy-footing around/ the marsh hardens/ the hard work of/ the heart’— there is a lot at stake here, in these poems, in these human-charged geometries, in these hard syllabics of the world-embedded heart.”
–CODY-ROSE CLEVIDENCE, author of Listen My Friend, This Is the Dream I Dreamed Last Night
