Are You There

Featured in the Guardian's best recent poetry These poems are like Neosporin; they sting and they heal. Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman In Are You There, Indiana poet Samantha Fain refracts contemporary melancholia into iridescent lyricism. Fain delights in breaking rules, the serendipity of autocorrect incantations, testing how far, in space and time, a connection will travel, and where it ends quoting sources including Schroedinger, Ask Jeeves and Kim Kardashian. In Fain's haunting poetics, grief, mania, pop culture, faith, quantum physics and digital relationships collide, alive with the spiky humour of brutal self-awareness, aglow with startling new language. Readers may recognise the title from the Netflix idle screen. Its combination of technology and vague distress is in keeping with the explorations of the self on show in this wittily knowing work. The Guardian The most lyrically provoking debut I've ever read. Fain articulates the complex contemporary manifestations of grief and desire, while still giving us possibility instead of foreclosure. C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking