Bright Machine

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

In Bright Machine, Canisia Lubrin gives poetic scrutiny to the legacy of human intelligence put in service of ruin. Using the fragmented music of Morse code, this poem tussles with the evolution of warcraft and the possibility for cohabitation. The result is a book of chimeric monologues using an invented form Lubrin calls the tesseract—a poem of sixteen lines, shaped in the logic of the mathematical cube—four stanzas: 4 lines + 5 lines + 6 lines + 1 line.

Addressing the myth of the developed world and its heirs and casualties, the poet names key weapons that guarantee(d) the rise and successes of ancient and modern empires. Lubrin reckons with the saga of civilization as the story of weapons history and its emissaries’ expansive appetites for recasting conquest and mass killing. Bright Machine is, all at once, heartening, urgent poetry for a turbulent world.