Set against the backdrop of a changing urban landscape, the poems in Tender Machines swing between the domestic and the surreal, charting motherhood, desire and an immigrant family’s haunted inheritance. Mapping the lives of women and the lives they inhabit, poems such as “Small Essays on Disappearance,”—which channel the aftermath of motherhood and 9-11—collide with aubades describing mornings in a ruined city: “buying food at the bodegas…nectarines and skin-tight plums.” The poems in Tender Machines live in the space between the public and the private, braiding an intimate narrative. This is an intersectional portrait of womanhood with all its losses, departures and wonders.

J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist and multidisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of poetics, media and performance. She is the author of two books of poetry, The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015) and Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023). Her book of hybrid essays on John Cage and the poetics of sound was a finalist for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her work has been anthologized in books published by W.W. Norton, Atelier Editions and Harvard University Press. She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bennington College, Mellon Foundation, Critical Minded, Jerome Foundation and Poets House. Recent writing appears in Poetry, Ploughshares, Esquire, Los Angeles Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, Boston Review, BookForum, among others. She is on the board of Kundiman, an organization supporting writers and readers from the Asian diaspora. She has taught at the Pratt Institute, Eugene Lang and Parsons School of Design. She teaches at The New School and lives in New York City.