Bright Machine

In Bright Machine, international award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin re-frames the history of civilisation as one of arms race, where human ingenuity is put in service of destruction and intelligence is weaponised against life.

Adopting the fragmented rhythms of Morse Code to score this book-length poem, and forging a new poetic form called the tesseract, Lubrin uses the music and geometry of industrial modernity to reckon with the myths of the developed world, its instruments of ruin, its heirs and casualties. In doing so, she echoes the famous William Carlos Williams adage, a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.

Written during the years where major armed conflicts ignited in Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine, Venezuela and Iran, Bright Machine is a lightning rod for all that is elided from the triumphant narrative of empires and asks if we can imagine another way of co-habitation. Epic and dazzling in scale, ten