Product details
- ISBN 9780226853031
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 165 x 241mm
- Publication Date: 06 Oct 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this formally inventive debut collection, a speaker continuously shapeshifts through roles, forms, and characters.
Alyssa N. Moore’s Come Again? conjures a series of otherworldly scenarios in which reinvention becomes a form of resistance and a method to escape the snares of a modern existence to which we contribute but cannot control. Throughout these surreal and absurdist poems, an untethered consciousness is continuously reincarnated and dragged through various personae—including the Volunteer, the Eternal Counselor, the Streetcleaner, and the Architect—to find “what exactly to do with a willing body.” For example, in “The Volunteer,” a visual sequence, the book’s shapeshifting narrator is dropped into a formless expanse and expected to perform. As we move through the collection, the speaker’s perception morphs rapidly. From wage worker to computer programmer to sexbot to God, they collide over and over with the boundaries of the world. With each shift, the speaker guides us through a series of darkly comic set pieces that are, in turns, cinematic and slapstick as they seek a solid home base from which to “reject the emptiness that’s inherited.”
Moore’s facility with poetic form, use of image and text, and play between irony and sincerity make Come Again? a bold collection that defies the customary and conventional, instead forging new worlds of continual remaking.
Alyssa N. Moore is the author of the chapbook WET MEDIA. She is an intermedia poet and an editor for Ghost Proposal, a journal for poetry and work outside traditional notions of genre. She was the inaugural winner of Poetry magazine’s Editors Prize for Visual Poetry.
