Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevensonâs Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technologyâs impact on connection and power.
Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that donât exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named âNia,â who her boss calls âhis typeâ; she loses hours researching âJune,â an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day âtrying to breakâ a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevensonâs poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams âabout the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints.â With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their ownâwhere they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.
Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: âI want to say better.â