Because You Previously Liked or Played
Sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, always sharply in touch with the moment, Jim Redmond’s Because You Previously Liked or Played is a distinctly millennial lean into Gen X cultural references and ironic poetics. In “Neoliberal Indifference,” Immanuel Kant appears “almost kindercore” and in “E Motherfucking T,” ET “starts saying things like my bad, / Charlie don’t surf, where’s the beef, // like do you know who I am, I’m E fucking T / and we’re out of Sunny D again.” Jesus pops up throughout; we encounter George Bush, Trump, and, in “Madam President: An Amazon Original,” Hilary Clinton is president in an “alternate reality” show.
Redmond’s style hits his targets best when he tackles digital life. “+1 269 217 6231 Has Left the Group” begins: “At the bottom of the group chat we build a small fire. / We feed it ourselves.” The weird intimacy of this burning mess drags through the “crackle and catch of all this soft architecture / we’ve called our story.” The <html> formatting of the poem “Basic HTML Tabs for 2000s Parents” proves more than a gimmick, echoing the accumulation of information embedded in contemporary digital life: a “choking game,” Porn Hub, Candy Crush, Amazon, “whiteguywithbackwardshatgivingthumbsup.gif,” and “#myteen is a four-and-a half-star teen <br />” along with “does pastiche of Maury Povich’s <br />” and “maybe other sharable Panopticons.”
The speaker of “Dark Web Pastoral” provides one of the more terrifying vantages:
I was a son of a son of some horse traders
from when the death of beauty was still a frontier
untouched by the data science.
Now I’m just another dumb kid dicking around
on the dark web, my synapses all sickly
with anarchist cookbook and pokemon card stats.
Now I’m writing a key sequence to set up a botnet.
Now I’m watching some torture porn.
Now I’m on your computer.
The poem grows darker from here. Digital life overlaps with real-world consequences in “Feed,” which moves toward a “little stupor of mice” and firecrackers: “all of the other boys laughing along with the crackle and pop / and I didn’t say anything, I did not look away.” Like his narrator, Redmond doesn’t look away.
