Book description
Catherine Bresner’s Can We Anything We See initiates a new mode of ekphrasis in the postinternet age. In this long poem, Bresner explores the ways in which current technologies, specifically artificial intelligence, outline the uncanny valley of speculative thought and shape a sense of personhood.
In lines that sometimes act as captions or ciphers (or both), Bresner allows for the caesuras of breath and contemplation, in consideration of the digital landscape human beings currently find themselves in. Simultaneously present, prescient, and timeless, Can We Anything We See invites infinite readings.
Advanced Praise
Catherine Bresner’s keyword unlocking a speculative ekphrasis, or doing to “cloud” what a prompted AI does to a human hand, messing it uncannily, making strange in its interpretive drift. The blanks above the poet’s extracts open the Possible even as they bracket what’s happened, captured broken links to an Internet that was so different only yesterday, remember? And if not: recall as these motile and unnerved lines do. While you’re there, recall, also, that the cues one writes to MidJourney may set us to picturing, too. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see anything? Can We Anything We See? Bresner, compellingly unsettled, asks. Yes, they/she do.
—Douglas Kearny, author of Sho
In the histories of our halting, weirdly haphazard journeys with AI yet to be written, let’s be sure to make space for Catherine Bresner’s swift, beautiful meditation on image, caption, technology, self, other....This is gorgeously inventive and important work.
—Hannah Brooks-Motl, author of Earth
Bresner’s Can We Anything We See is as its amorphous speaker-user intones: a “hallucinatory artifact” beyond the “capitalist gory holes” of our daily scrolls. What we find at the edge is not just the vertiginous horror of unchecked sight, but a site of possible subjectivity: “outside the I space.”
—Chris Campanioni, author of VHS and The Internet is for Real
winner of the 2017 diode book prize
the empty season can be found through Diode Editions, or at your local bookstore ( ♥ Open Books.) Or, if you must, Amazon.
Catherine Bresner’s first collection the empty season is a formally audacious, dexterous, & heart/filled book of bravery & strange. Head-butting the strictures that surround a traditional poem she collapses the collage, the erasure, the illustration, musical notation, the hyperlink, & the high lyric. One piece opens “Write, they say, like a band-aid / when writing feels like the wound.” & these poems perform both functions, the wound & the suture. This is a beautiful book.
—sam sax, author of Pig and Bury It
Beautiful and imagistic, the empty season feels as if it is being written in real time, with its contemporary ear and relevant sorrows. Indeed, this is a book of the times. The strong voice in these poems and poetry comics is innovative, fresh, sincere, and maybe most importantly, has an intelligent curiosity. “Today the chore of being alive” is what I feel, and when I look at these poems: gorgeous collage, illustration, language—that is the music that keeps me going as a reader. It is delicious to read and see this book in the world.
—Bianca Stone, author of What is Otherwise Intimate, Vermont State Poet Laureate
Catherine Bresner brings a freshly savvy vision to the conditions of modern life—to our broken intimacies with others, to our alienation from our own best selves, and to our impaired commitments to civic wholeness. Dark in its whimsy and subversive in its truth-telling, the empty season is full of a kind of Baudelairean spleen, bitter and exuberant at the same time. As one of Bresner’s speakers declares: “How knowledge can be a euphemism / for wreckage, as in I will wreck you.” That’s a fair—and most welcome—warning from a vivid new ironist in our poetry.
—Rick Barot, author of Chord
Photo credit: Colleen Louise Barry
Everyday Eros
Mount Analogue, 2017
“Bresner is the raging id of the South Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1923, unleashed on the page. She has glued photographs of topless women riding horses and drawn giant phalluses over passages. She transforms the charm-school manners lectures into declarations of freedom: “Outsiders judge you / more than they / help.” She frees the individual from the crushing expectations of others: “with a stranger / you / may secretly feel / ashamed / Never allow any feeling of awkwardness to keep you from doing what you know to be correct.”
ERoS is a book that is exorcising itself. A reader can’t help but imagine the faculty of the high school tut-tutting their way through this Sharpied text, with Bresner’s illustrations of gushing vaginas and charges to “allow your curiosity to lead you” and “give / oral,” above a cartoon of two women in a science-fiction sex rig fellating a man as their own erogenous zones are plugged with what one assumes to be suction devices. It’s a bawdy, sexy explosion of hormones and enthusiasm and empowerment.”
— PAUL CONSTANT, THE SEATTLE REVIEW OF BOOKS
View the erasure series at Mount Analogue here.
