Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

"Like a ghost in the machine, TRAVESTY GENERATOR remixes programming codes and turns them to ruminate on the intersections of race and gender. Rhythmic, hypnotic, and percussive, the poems are iterative and suggest the infinite recursions of nano data. The poems pay homage to lives taken too soon, those of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, pulls heroes like Harriet Tubman into the present, and offers the wisdoms spoken by Black mothers to their children. TRAVESTY GENERATOR reminds us that programming languages and computer codes are not neutral. But while oppressive algorithms abound, the poems hack their way into new connections and possibilities for Black life."--Amazon.com

Personal Science investigates what happens when the imagined life and the stories we tell ourselves become terrifying. Yielding to no strict genre boundaries, Bertram's poems reveal in new ways our human ability to inhabit both mental and physical worlds.--

"Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley. The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation's first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What's next for Black poetic expression?"--Back cover.