Do You Remember Being Born?

Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Sean Michaels's moving, innovative novel about an aging poet laureate who "sells out" by agreeing to collaborate with a Big Tech company's poetry AI. Do You Remember Being Born? is sensitively narrated by the aging, world-renowned poet Marian Ffarmer. Marian's pristine life of the mind ? for which she's sacrificed nearly all personal relationships, from romance to friendship to showing up for her son ? is interrupted one day by a cryptic invitation from a tech giant. Come to California, the invitation beckons, and write with a machine. The Company's lucrative offer ? for Marian to compose a 'historic partnership' of a poem with their highly intelligent poetry bot, called Charlotte ?, much as it chafes at everything she believes about art-making as an individual pursuit, is a second chance she cannot resist. And so to California she goes, a skeptic. But as unexpectedly welcome to Marian as suddenly being a financially reliable parent is her generative, growing fascination with Charlotte.