Machines Like Us by J River Helms
Machines Like Us is part love story, part dreamscape, part exploration of self. For the characters (Speaker, Boy, and Historian), love is dangerous, disorienting, self-erasing. To understand themselves as individuals, they must investigate the boundaries separating each from the other.
Boy finds a spot beneath a tree & stretches out
taking up half of the forest floor. Historian & I
have to keep stepping over Boy’s limbs & sometimes
we step into each other, a pile of Boy & Historian & me.
Over the course of the collection, the three struggle to tether and untether. They continuously disturb and upend, externally and internally. They are terrified to be with and without each other. The resulting horror—blood, broken bodies, decomposition—is a landscape, both natural and unnatural, of their glorious failure.
Publication Date: March 15, 2016
Paperback: 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-938103-44-5
Also available as an eBook
Machines Like Us is part love story, part dreamscape, part exploration of self. For the characters (Speaker, Boy, and Historian), love is dangerous, disorienting, self-erasing. To understand themselves as individuals, they must investigate the boundaries separating each from the other.
Boy finds a spot beneath a tree & stretches out
taking up half of the forest floor. Historian & I
have to keep stepping over Boy’s limbs & sometimes
we step into each other, a pile of Boy & Historian & me.
Over the course of the collection, the three struggle to tether and untether. They continuously disturb and upend, externally and internally. They are terrified to be with and without each other. The resulting horror—blood, broken bodies, decomposition—is a landscape, both natural and unnatural, of their glorious failure.
Publication Date: March 15, 2016
Paperback: 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-938103-44-5
Also available as an eBook
Machines Like Us is part love story, part dreamscape, part exploration of self. For the characters (Speaker, Boy, and Historian), love is dangerous, disorienting, self-erasing. To understand themselves as individuals, they must investigate the boundaries separating each from the other.
Boy finds a spot beneath a tree & stretches out
taking up half of the forest floor. Historian & I
have to keep stepping over Boy’s limbs & sometimes
we step into each other, a pile of Boy & Historian & me.
Over the course of the collection, the three struggle to tether and untether. They continuously disturb and upend, externally and internally. They are terrified to be with and without each other. The resulting horror—blood, broken bodies, decomposition—is a landscape, both natural and unnatural, of their glorious failure.
Publication Date: March 15, 2016
Paperback: 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-938103-44-5
Also available as an eBook
PRAISE FOR MACHINES LIKE US
“A dark and deeply obsessive book. It is almost impossible to forget the three primary characters in this collection after witnessing their twisted and repetitive attempts to connect, after witnessing the fact they cannot separate acts of love from acts of harm.”
—C. Dale Young, author of The Second Person and Torn
“Out of three hearts (Boy Heart, Historian Heart, and Poet Heart), Helms has woven a new poetics of vulnerability that tells the story of survival and lust, brutality and tenderness.”
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of The Babies and Tsim Tsum
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J River Helms (they/them) has published poetry and prose in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, New England Review, Phoebe, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. J has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and lives in Houston, TX with their partner, pets, and plants. They can be found on Instagram (@jriverhelms).
