Hello. Your Promise Has Been Extracted

the left swipe on Tinder. It is, perhaps, the epitome of twenty-first-century love. The final section of three in the book, “Poems Conceived as Dialogues between Two Antagonistic Voices,” is a fascinating marriage of traditional script used as poem and the existential oddities we face in the twenty-first century, such as the noise of virtual reality. Each subsection here lists the full names of characters with brief descriptions to set each scene. The third lists the characters of “Mother of Older Child, Imploded” and “The Awesome Voice of the Internet,” with direction notes of “The Scene is everywhere/nowhere.” This surreal universe can only rationally exist in the form of a poem after the litany of contemporary absurdity already explored in the collection. We are called to see that we have all plugged into the Matrix—the Internet— a self-proclaimed deity grasping to control humanity that says, “I’m the Bright, White Spirit of the Age, / you, if you will, are just some sagging hausfrau, / your gut a bag of fat, LOL, in your lap – / I’m sorry: redact. Delete. Report Abuse.” Sarah Warren University of North Texas Ahren Warner Hello. Your Promise Has Been Extracted Hexham, Northumberland. Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions. 2017. 128 pages. Ahren Warner’s third book is, from the start, clearly about the weight of history. “[E]ach city east of Bremen bears the pockmarks of a bygone pogrom gouged into its brickwork,” he tells us, beginning his travelogue of fragmentary lyric and architectural photography. The best thing about this book is that it feels peripatetic, like the travel diaries of Basho. This is, however, a grim journey. Along the way, Warner drags out all the most tired conventions of postmodern verse: extreme white space, the secondperson pronoun, a lack of titles. None of this adds up to profundity. The photos tend toward the close-up of architectural detail that is the standard trade of undergraduate literary magazines. The poems often rely on either ham-fisted unpleasantness —“the ultimate cunt / – our botched / civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizz / of consciousness”—or deep-sounding but fatuous vagaries such as: Money makes an inverse difference to distance, when I lift her back to me now: nothing there but that pale curly head working, a machine up and down, an ochre autumn merging into twilight. Much of the book reads like the lesser bits of Rilke translated by someone who speaks no German. Occasionally the verse descends into complete nonsense: “Soup. Soup. Soup. Rage. / You will have nothing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Wrestling with the Devil: A Prison Memoir New Press In December 1977 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was arrested and imprisoned without charge in Kenya’s Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison. While quarantined with other political prisoners and spending time in solitary confinement , Ngũgĩ wrote a novel, Devil on the Cross, on the only paper available: toilet paper. This revised edition of the memoir, now published in America for the first time, details the pain and defiance that birthed his classic novel. Futhi Ntshingila We Kiss Them with Rain Catalyst Press In her North American debut, Futhi Ntshingila tells the story of Mvelo, a fourteen-year-old South African girl whose mother is dying of AIDS as Mvelo herself is wrestling with something painful that happened to her. In a series of coincidences and opportunities , Mvelo finds herself presented with the chance to rise above suffering in a story equal parts comedic and tragic. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 85 in your pot / but a broomstick and a pay cut[.]” Sometimes there is an admirable attempt at irony, but it usually descends into mere bathos: “Please, do not imagine a lame pony scuttling, wheeling against the ground, slated for retirement by Mr. HighVelocity Rifle.” The poet also takes a distinctly undergraduate approach to allusion, dropping in names from philosophy with no real import for the poem or embroidering his own lines with some of the most highlighted bits of the Norton Anthology. He really wants everyone to know he has read Hegel, and Adorno, and Yeats. He even includes an index to make sure we don’t miss how clever

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