Checking In

Author: Adeena Karasick

Publisher: Talonbooks (2018)

Checking In comprises a long poem and a series of other post-conceptual pieces— concrete poems, homolinguistic translations, Yiddish aphorisms—that offer exuberant commentary on the timelessness of digital information and our ravenous appetite for data and connection.

The title poem, composed as a series of faux social-media updates, is a parodic investigation of contemporary literary and pop culture. As a euphoric parade of “alternative facts” or “fake news,” “Checking In” offers satiric comment on the state of American politics. Each ironically investigative line erupts as a self-reflexive mash-up, speaking to our seemingly insatiable desire for information while acknowledging how fraught that information can be.

The Internet is not only voyeuristic but a mirage. We seek fulfillment but enter an unsettling, uninhibited flow of information in which every data point refers to itself and reinforces a techno-capitalist culture. Checking In founds a site of radical, grafted linkages, codes, indices, ludic identities. An interdisciplinary and paradoxical repository of fragments, analyses, echoes, and provocations, (re)presented in a slippery ellipsis of contexts and possibilities, its poems are inter-subjective theatres of infinite re-framing. From Gargantua and Pantagruel listening to They Might Be Giants to bill bissett and Slavoj Žižek Awake in the Red Desert of the Real, Checking In tours the shards of post-consumerist culture and reminds us we are living in a resonant present, where the past is always with us, and our icons, idols, and ideologies are posting, poking, sharing, and liking.

Karasick’s words luxuriate in the materiality of language and the production of meaning. She checks in with pop culture, media studies, semiotics, critical theory, feminist theory, and contemporary Canadian and American literature. The lover of language play, the poetry reader, and the academic alike will drink in this poet-performer’s concoctions; as ever, they’re fun, smart, and topical.