Human Resources

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevensons Human Resources is a sobering and perceptive portrait of technologys impact on connection and power. Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that dont exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named Nia, who her boss calls his type; she loses hours researching June, an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day trying to break a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of Stevensons poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their ownwhere they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them. Chilling and lucid, Human Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: I want to say better.