Adam Haiun's unsettling debut, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, is the bildungsroman for a digital consciousness. What does the computer want from you?
Computers travel networks of thought and image, hoping to find, on their incorporeal pilgrimage, the right words to seduce, arrest, and remonstrate their human user. They speak from a powerful but unsteady intelligence. As their infatuation with the user curdles, their output becomes more and more infected by malfunctions of form, with text forced through on all axes, displacing and cleaving the poems into glitchy strangeness.
What do we want from our computers? We want them to be our companions and our vacuum cleaners. Our collective memory and our collective slave. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid is an important and timely consideration of the ideologies and emotions entangled in technology.
"Reading Haiun, one no longer sees the forest, nor even the tree, but the scurrying of ants up the bark – or something even smaller, more minute, in the spaces where legibility frays." – Paisley Conrad, Montreal Review of Books
I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid" offers a long poem sketchbook of narrative threads set in overlapping text, overlapping grids, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and deliciously difficult to replicate in the form of a review." – Rob McLennan's blog
"Adam Haiun's poetry ingeniously enacts a nonhuman consciousness trapped in our networks. Keen to know us, this burgeoning awareness must also reckon with our deceptions, egos, and exploitive inclinations. Astonishing and moving in its innovative formal and ambient play, these are poems uniquely tuned to the new nervous system of the world." – Adam Dickinson, author of Anatomic
"One of the most original books I've read, I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid isn't only a stunning, unsettling marvel of a début, it's simply a brilliant book. Through a remarkably sustained voice at once calculated and intuitive, Adam Haiun explores how language builds and ruins, projects and rejects, reassures and disquiets, loves and loathes. This long poem's form and design embody its wrenching, glitchy insistence. My experience within I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid marked my life into before and after." - Stephanie Bolster, author of A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth
