I never thought I’d read a book of poetry about robots, let alone fall in love with it.

In Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life, technology, terror and emotional disconnection form an eerie patchwork of existence in our time. Harvey uses slightly surreal imagery and a unique vocabulary to construct her haunting vision. While Harvey’s voice can at first seem overtly intellectual, her fierce images build to create an intense reading experience.

I’ve tried to read Matthea Harvey before, with an earlier book - Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, and felt entirely left out. Her language seemed too cold, too removed and I didn’t “get” it. Maybe it was just me. (It’s happened before.) But I suggested Modern Life for January’s Poetry Book Club (PBC), having heard so many good things about it. When I started Modern Life I thought, “Here we go again.” Her images are strange and range from ham flowers to slaughtered sailors, with a menagerie of zoo animals stuck in between. And these examples are from only the first 3 or 4 poems.

For me the book improved in the second section, with her series “The Future of Terror.” These poems use a loose abecedarian form to explore the intense disconnectedness we feel following 9/11. In an endnote, Harvey describes her process in writing these. She began by making lists of words found in the dictionary between “future” and “terror.” While this could have created a haphazard list, Harvey instead constructs gems like “there is an intimacy to invasion” (2007, p. 11) and “We’d killed all the inventors and all / the jesters just when we most needed humor / and invention.” (2007, p. 22). Random? Yes, and true to our times.

One of the final sections contains poems entitled “The Terror of Future,” which leads us backwards alphabetically from terror to the future. With these two linguistic constructions framing her book, I am forced to question whether terror will lead us to the future or the future will lead us to terror. (Unfortunately, I believe both may be the case.)

The heart of Modern Life lies within the central section of prose poems, featuring Robo Boy. Robo Boy is a facsimile of a child, purchased by his parents, who is trying to understand what it means to be human. He certainly looks lifelike, with spray-on skin and eerie illuminated eyes, but he feels mechanized and empty.

My favorite Robo Boy poem is “Moving Day,” in which he tries to teach himself complex emotions. He is programmed for five base emotions, “HAPPY, SAD, ANGRY, CONFUSED and CONTENT” (2007, p. 45), but he knows the key to humanity holds more. So he crafts decorated semi-opaque sheets through which he can view the world.

For MELANCHOLY TINGED WITH SWEETNESS, he soaks the sheet in gloppy gray paint, pastes on ripped photographs of factories, and sprays the mess with Chanel No. 5. For TEARS TURNING TO LAUGHTER he sprinkles the top half with glitter and paints a baseline of blue. Tomorrow he will go on a walk with the sheets stored in his backpack. He’ll sit on a fence and look at the clouds, through exhilaration, hysteria, delight, despair. (2007, p. 45)

How different is Robo Boy’s experience than a typical child’s emotional education? Rather than using decorated Styrofoam sheets, children are left to view the world through media’s images (ripped photographs of factories) to develop their feelings.

I would highly recommend Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life. This is not a book that will make you feel optimistic about our present or our future. Instead, you will feel, like many of the central images in her book, cleaved in half by the omnipresent uncertainty and distant violence in our lives. Perhaps, as Harvey suggests in the final poem, “Setting the Table,” we are supposed to survive on the border between light and dark, day and night, safety and insecurity, in order to feel “just right” (2007, p. 82).

To learn more about Matthea Harvey and Modern Life, read interviews with her at Bookslut and Tarpaulin Sky. Of course, you are also invited to join – or listen in on – the Poetry Book Club discussion. Happy reading!

* * *

Harvey, Matthea. (2007). Modern Life: Poems. St. Paul: Graywolf Press.
Harvey, Matthea. (2000). Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form. Farmington: Alice James Books.

Matthea Harvey’s website can be found at www.mattheaharvey.info .

* * *

February’s PBC book at 9 to 5 Poet is Leilani Hall’s Swimming the Witch. Discussions usually start the end of the month.

Hall, Leilani. (2005). Swimming the Witch. Cincinnati: Cherry Grove Collections-Wordtech Communications.