Call Me Spes

What a beguiling, intriguing, and evocative book is Sara Marron's Call Me Spes. It entails a Virgilian journey undertaken by its disembodied narrator, an iOS device who gradually becomes aware of the nature of its User's needs and increasingly cognizant of our ubiquitous human longing for connection. Simultaneously, this elusive narrator overhears a diverse chorus of plaintive voices, and thereby struggles to expand its understanding of people's complexity and pathos. With an eloquent power, Call Me Spes charts how our suffering, pain, and loss may be relieved through our hopefulness and yearning for love. Marron's highly original book offers us a memorable exploration into the impulses, obsessions, and durability of the human heart.

-Maurya Simon, author of The Wilderness, 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Medal in Poetry

Sara Marron's new book brightens the world with innovative lines and animated poems. This cumulative tale is storytelling at its highest-tenderness combined with jazzlike words set against "data mixing" idioms. You don't have to know Dante's Divine Comedy to enjoy the journey because iOS will be your narrator. Current computer language, ie: "pixels" and "coding," share the page with ancient thrusts of danger, loss, and love. I applaud this writer's poetic will, her originality, range and dynamic -beyond personality and flair-to become a poetry inventor. Call Me Spes is a literary adventure.  

-Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

The operating system of this book seeks to find poetry in an online universe of eclectic voices, with dramatic monologues popping up from members of a human chorus seeking jobs, love, information, good times, spiritual sustenance. You feel like you're sitting in on an AA meeting filled with tales of desperation or concealed near a prison pay phone listening to inmates talk to their loved ones. Sara Marron asks, "d0es this 100k like Eng 1 ish?" Call Me Spes does not always resemble conventional writing, but these inventive texts uncover the real language of contemporary screen-life-"a hopeful/desire code/ hope hope/they/can read/ that code."

-Terence Winch

To say that Sara Marron's Call Me Spes is a tour of various contemporary Infernos and Purgatorios by way of memory as recorded and as learned by computers in computer language is to suggest the detached and disembodied voice of a machine, but what the computer has recorded is in fact a set of hard lives caught in the process of fragmentation. The computer learns their language, however imperfectly, and tries to apply it to a relation of love addressed to the user. The result is a virtuosic commedia-tragedy: a disembodied yet weeping god's-eye view of human desperation.

-George Szirtes, poet, translator, T.S. Eliot Prize winner for poe...