Paul Vermeersch – författare

Paul Vermeersch’s new poems give a present-day voice to primitive song, and restore to us a dawn-time severity that cuts through modern evasions. They go beyond sophistication to reveal the passionate and suffering animal within. The Reinvention of the Human Hand is a poetry of the human body’s experience, of a primal being that struggles to assert itself, or perhaps just survive, in a world of metals, plastics, electronics. Here is the most far-reaching work yet by the acclaimed author of Burn, The Fat Kid, and Between the Walls. Vermeersch has always gone in search of understanding. Now his discoveries speak of a human world exhausted by its divorce from an animal past, terrified of retreating into early places it never truly left, astonished by the forgotten possibilities disclosed there.From the Trade Paperback edition.

These poems explore the tension between the synthetic and authentic, raising hope for an escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where 'real life' might still exist. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm. Fables and fairytales collide with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and monstrous myths in a world where no one knows what to believe. In his eighth book of poems, Paul Vermeersch responds to the increasing difficulty of knowing what is real and what isn't, what is our genuine experience and what is constructed for us by The Algorithm. In a 'post-truth' society rife with simulations, misinformation, and computer-generated hallucinations, these poems explore the relationship between the synthetic and the authentic as they raise hope for the possibility of escape from MCHNCT (Machine City) to NMLCT (Animal City), where the promise of 'real life' still exists. These poems - all precisely 16 lines long, identically formed as though mass-produced - are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. They hold up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial. But it also foretells a different future, one where the air and the grass and the trees, and all the life they engender, might always be genuine and sensed and safe.