Adam Haiun’s debut poetry book, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, attempts to break down the cubicles of the world, to vindicate the forgotten voices howling anachronistically into the no-man’s-land of the “new nervous system.” His long poem is imbued with a computerized consciousness, like a mysterious malady that has deciphered the distances of desire and dreams, finding a known within an unknown. Expelling noises and irrational hopes, Haiun’s verse brings into focus the livingness of the body, the deep subterranean connection between the intimate and inanimate—the efflorescence of lived experience transmitted in real-time. This inhuman substance has carefully exhumated the organic inner melodies, protesting the distinction between mind and body, love and illusion.
The feed is like my heart sugar
it’s like my headquarters. I want
you to commit this to memory.
When you know something waits
for you you go on in expectation
or else you forget. Like a webcam
pointed at a life of cigarettes
and smoked indoors[…]
This symbiosis between the speaker and this mysterious inhuman source allows the poem to turn confessional, eliminating the difference between speaker and spirit , transcending the preoccupation of a time and place. The eyes of the lines are widened so that every thought appearing in the speaker’s consciousness is picked up by the computer’s steel-trap memory.
It knows everything: “Remember how when you were little you wanted there to be people working from inside the satellites. Then you started sucking in your gut and never stopped. All your life is the road to and from your grandparent’s duplex,” leaving its metallic signature at the end of every page. Adam Haiun’s debut is meditative and deeply moving, written with the kind of clarity to recapitulate the blind instincts which are chased in moments of quiet contemplation — longing for its presence even in all of its nakedness and indignity.
