Not Us Now

Zoë Hitzig

In her vertiginous second collection, Zoë Hitzig delivers an astonishing act of ventriloquy in reverse – speaking not through the voice of a singular, lyric “I,” but through a consciousness that seems to have amassed itself out of the detritus of human life. The future world of Not Us Now is remembered in an even further future, where language is both the survivor and the cargo of an earthly wreckage. Crushed under the weight of collection and storage, what remains are those records of human curiosity, habit, and longing which have increasingly formed the information economies of the present. What are we doing to language and ourselves as we extract more and more material for questionable optimization? What will the appetite of a controlled, controlling public erode from the private? Across a series of elliptical, siren-like poems and sequences, Hitzig performs an urgent lyric intervention, recovering defiance from our accumulating raw-data footprints. With equal measures of method and entropy, Not Us Now presents the chorus we are hurtling toward, our own voices in the future issuing a plea for a new course.