Bright Machine

From critically acclaimed and internationally celebrated poet Canisia Lubrin comes the highly anticipated new collection, Bright Machine.

This profoundly engaged, boldly formed long suite poem probes the legacy of human intelligence put in service of ruin. The rhythm of Morse Code drives the poem’s haunting music as the poet records the effects of warcraft on places and times of perilous and bright possibility for human cohabitation. The result is a book of chimeric monologues in an invented form Lubrin calls the tesseract—a poem of 16 lines of fragmented music, shaped by the logic of the mathematical cube—four stanzas growing from the quatrain, each increased by one line until the final one-line stanza.

The poet here addresses the myth of the developed world’s heirs, casualties, and its wing of weapons that guarantee(d) the successes of empires. Bright Machine reckons with the saga of civilization as the story of arms history and its emissaries’ expansive appetites for recasting conquest and mass killing, in, all at once, heartening, urgent poetry for a turbulent world.