Wrestling with the experience of living online as a non-digital native 

Joanna Fuhrman didn’t grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from “You Won’t Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now” to “We’ll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It,” the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated. 

JOANNA FUHRMAN is the author of six previous poetry collections, most recently To a New Era. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Slowdown podcast, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and a coeditor of Hanging Loose Press.

"Joanna Fuhrman's Data Mind braves through the minefield of social media, our individualism heightened, flattened, and eventually erased as we post selfies and search for community. Instead we find clickbait, bots, the dark web, and ChatGPT in these surreal prose poems that take on the shape of our phones and computer screens, the boxes we put ourselves in and then try to punch out of.  Fuhrman's monitors are an eerie update to Baudelaire's "Windows"—Perhaps you will say "Are you sure that your story is the real one?" Data Mind is gorgeous and complex, an important book for the digital age."—Denise Duhamel, author of Blowout