Human Resources: Poems

Ryann Stevenson's Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology's impact on connection and power. It follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that do not exist. The speaker grapples with uneasiness and isolation, attempting to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skincare. She imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own, where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Format: Hardback
Length: 96 pages
Publication date: 28 July 2022
Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson's Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technology's impact on connection and power. Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that do not exist. In discerning verse, she workshopped the facial characteristics of a floating head named "Nia," who her boss calls "his type"; she lost hours researching "June," an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spent a whole day "trying to break" a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevenson's poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skincare, though she dreams "about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints." With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: "I want to say better."

Weight: 230g
Dimension: 148 x 223 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781571315182