NMLCT

“NMLCT’s assured, diamond-knife vision is better described as augural than speculative. Every word is well chosen, every pixel assertive on this atlas to worlds that are at once obscure and familiar. It is an elegant ultimatum. Its poetry is stretched taut between meta-allegory and instruction manual for seeking, finding, and reforming the self. It calls us to denounce the ambivalent, bevelled, and algorithmic recursion of machine thought. It invites us to travel through rebellion and transition to transfiguration, to emerge rewilded and rearranged—a gift the best books leave us with. You’ll want to go back immediately.” — Tolu Oloruntoba, author of The Junta of Happenstance and Unravel
“Paul Vermeersch’s beguiling NMLCT articulates both common despair and the resilience of hope. Anchored by form and a keen sense of rhythm, these ambitious poems depict fantastical worlds that mirror the disorientation of our increasingly unbelievable landscape.” — Annick MacAskill, author of Shadow Blight and Votive
“NMLCT is the corner we’ve backed ourselves into—and perhaps a map out of it. This is an essential book, an avalanche of compressed fairy tales for our time. Paul Vermeersch has become more daring and emphatic with every poetry collection, and this book is a blistering mourner’s lament: audacious, brutal, compassionate, and darkly ecstatic. ‘What on earth,’ he asks, ‘has happened here, and when? Who is the astronaut and who is the ape?’” — Stuart Ross, author of The Book of Grief and Hamburgers and The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky
“Composed as a response to recent more overt cultural shifts across technology#.#.#.# this collection furthers a growing (and intriguing) thread of speculative fiction across Canadian poetry. Vermeersch’s poems provide a landscape of speculative conflict as warning for the present, of where this all might be heading.” — rob mclennan’s blog
“In NMLCT, Vermeersch creates a multimedia experience that mirrors the hybrid nature of contemporary digital life. The reader must navigate text, image, and code much as we navigate our daily digital environments. The poems argue for the irreplaceable value of human consciousness, intuition, and embodied experience in an age increasingly dominated by algorithmic thinking. NMLCT reminds us that the animal city, however threatened, remains our true home.” — The Seaboard Review
“NMLCT encourages us to make new thoughts, new connections, new poems amidst the old abandoned computer code and made-to-sell cheap design work, amidst ‘the glitches’ of background machine noise. These spellbinding poems, at once allusive and engaging, are portents, wards against the artificial intelligence and misinformation we find so much of our modern lives are now mired in, but they are also, I think, signposts, maps for finding our way back out, through words, to our genuine selves.” — The Woodlot
“Vermeersch interrogates the artifice of life, of our very existence, how life (existence) is both a concrete thing that is right in front of us, all around, under us, and yet is also entirely a made-up thing. We are both animal and machine, but also, kind of neither, kind of in-between, in that mirrored box, a reflection of ourselves in the forest. I enjoyed wandering through this poetry collection because it reminded me to slow down and think about what is real, and therefore what I need to save myself from the world, and what the world needs to save it from itself.” — Junction Reads
“An interesting and memorable read.” — Flavia Lately blog

Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.

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