NMLCT: Poems

Poetry that explores our “post-truth” society, NMLCT holds up a mirror not only to nature, but also to its unnatural distortions and facsimiles. Imagine The Matrix retold by the reanimated cyborg bodies of the Brothers Grimm. “Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection, and this book is a blistering mourner’s lament: audacious, brutal, compassionate, and darkly ecstatic. ‘What on earth,’ he asks, ‘has happened here, and when? Who is the astronaut and who is the ape?’” — Stuart Ross, author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky Fables and fairy tales 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. All precisely 16 lines long — identically formed as though mass-produced — these poems are themselves artificial creations, products of the imagination, sometimes disorienting but always vivid. 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.

About the Author :
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.

Review :
“NMLCT’s assured, diamond-knife vision is better described as augural than speculative. Every word is well chosen, every pixel assertive on this atlas to worlds that are at once obscure and familiar. It is an elegant ultimatum. Its poetry is stretched taut between meta-allegory and instruction manual for seeking, finding, and reforming the self. It calls us to denounce the ambivalent, bevelled, and algorithmic recursion of machine thought. It invites us to travel through rebellion and transition to transfiguration, to emerge rewilded and rearranged—a gift the best books leave us with. You’ll want to go back immediately.” — Tolu Oloruntoba, author of The Junta of Happenstance and Unravel “Paul Vermeersch’s beguiling NMLCT articulates both common despair and the resilience of hope. Anchored by form and a keen sense of rhythm, these ambitious poems depict fantastical worlds that mirror the disorientation of our increasingly unbelievable landscape.” — Annick MacAskill, author of Shadow Blight and Votive “NMLCT is the corner we’ve backed ourselves into—and perhaps a map out of it. This is an essential book, an avalanche of compressed fairy tales for our time. Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection, and this book is a blistering mourner’s lament: audacious, brutal, compassionate, and darkly ecstatic. ‘What on earth,’ he asks, ‘has happened here, and when? Who is the astronaut and who is the ape?’” — Stuart Ross, author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky “Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology#.#.#.# this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry. Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading.” — rob mclennan’s blog