Internet Girls
The poems of "Internet Girls" concern themselves with electronic as well as physical loss and inevitability; they try to contain that slippage, to box up all that which is evanescent and disappearing. Their speaker is exhausted if not exhaustive and possibly also electronic herself, a queer female narrator staring down the untraversable span between intimacy and distance: “I keep thinking how I wish I were a poet to describe / certain things I cannot get right.” A shifting constellation of images embroiders the work together through textual and linguistic disruptions. “Someone has to sleep with politicians, be a starfucker, do your dirty / service, this work of being soap-slimed and broken,” observes one; in sequence, the lyrics stand for something natural, mystical, and larger than the self, even split by grief: “So I loved on, a desperate believer, / divider: three parts in vain but two / just here for the river.”
Bio
JSA Lowe is an ASU alum, having earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 2010.
Praise for this book
By turns notational, fluid, imploring, and unruly, 'Internet Girls' emanates with a brand of joy—élan vital meets “blister & filth” brimming with everyday intimacy. In lines that mirror a caustic sense of self, the poems reflect immediacy of mind as being 'alright with my fight / fine by my fears and my queers and my tangles.'
Roberto José Tejada
'Internet Girls' is a work of genius, the kind of genius that unsettles you and challenges you and cheers you as you stumble in the wake of it. Lowe’s poems rattle and wobble and keep opening up, refusing nothing, despairing and celebrating and despairing again—and then joking about the despair. The poems boil over the way a mind boils over at 3 am of a sleepless night—with fears and worries and sudden jolts of insight.
Jon Davis
