A Machine Wrote This Song
In Jennifer Hayashida’s A Machine Wrote This Song, the speakers are hooked on phenomenology in fitful attempts to understand competing scales of intimacy and violence, continuity and disruption. The collection invites us to experience the loss of translation (between languages, generations, and geographies) with a tender scrupulousness and attention to how the private plays out in public. Equal parts definition and destruction of language as material, Hayashida’s first collection of poems challenges us to examine the continuous intertwining of biopolitics and poetics.
A Machine Wrote This Song offers linguistic tactics to examine reality as an infinite series of distorted connections. By mining her distrust of narrative, Hayashida explores the lexical torsion surrounding the maternal / the machinic, war / art, memory / strategy, syntax / feeling. Throughout the collection, we are reminded to both revere and question our personal and collective relationship to the histories we embody through language.
praise for a machine wrote this song
I have never read a book quite like A Machine Wrote This Song, a single collection that holds so much: the intimacy of a body splitting during birth, questions of lineage, the ravages of the global factory, “an Alaskan village” that must move “inland to escape the encroaching ocean lip,” other considerations of the natural world, the limits of language, immigration, and everyday life. What allows this holding is the poems’ practice of intuitive association, a research into narrative that at once breaks it open and re-glues it together for our fragile contemporary, creating a kind of utterance between the now and some nearby future. In this case, the language that speaks into this near future, like the black glow glinting atop the ocean’s forever-moving, blue surface, called itself into my mouth, and, late one night, I read every single poem aloud to myself while sitting alone on my deck. If a machine wrote this song, it is a machine that has an astoundingly human sensibility. This is a fresh, relevant, gorgeous new voice.
– Dawn Lundy Martin, “Looking Back: BOMB Contributors on Literature in 2018”
Jennifer Hayashida’s brilliant debut collection traces transnational movements of capital, from vocabulary to vegetables, in a song scrambled by industry and technology, by cruelty and intimacy, family and geography. The book is steely, motherly, tender, violent, elegiac—combinations often unseen yet lived daily. With grammar acute enough to enact our emergencies, attention careful enough to catch “the last sound from the past,” Hayashida’s A Machine Wrote This Song shocks us awake. When I lift my gaze from it, everything’s somehow alien, millimeters off. I’ve been waiting for this book, and what a stunning arrival it is, what a necessary disillusionment for us all, here in the late empire.
– Solmaz Sharif
Some forms of travel leave mostly intangible traces: impressions, like the soft dent in an infant's head—a passing receptivity to what divides the world. As with translation, both host and visitor are necessarily transformed. A Machine Wrote This Song exists in this space of necessity, an urgent reminder that when we cast our attention with intent, we fortify our margins against the conditions of control. What can take place in these margins fills these poems with relation: to family and the domestic; to history's trampling of polis and land; to the subjective architecture of inter-lingual, intergenerational, transcultural life; to looking down and up. Jennifer Hayashida has written a searing and haunting book, one I read without moving, almost without breathing. It followed me to the streets, the subway; it left a dent. Transformed, "I nodded off, then on."
– Anna Moschovakis
"The Pathologos" (PEN America)
"Virginia Street" (The Academy of American Poets, curated by Dawn Lundy Martin)
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