Beautiful Machine Woman Language

BEAUTIFUL MACHINE WOMAN LANGUAGE extrapolates Catherine Chen's experiences as a data transcriptionist for the Amazon Echo in order to examine the emotional--often invisibilized--spaces occupied by the human workers who service AI and other emergent technologies. Beginning with a lyric romance between an unnamed data worker and the AI with whom she falls in love, the collection curates a polyphonic space for how we can imagine our languages of desire for collective dreaming, longing, and archiving.

"Catherine Chen's BEAUTIFUL MACHINE WOMAN LANGUAGE polymorphs like polymer from poetic composition to femme body, landscape to computer terminal. Throughout, Chen refutes futurity for a present when 'fatigue is a collective noun,' engaging the cyborg as a figure of despair. Chen's disconcerting reports stream like stunned wartime kyrons; their lyric, a black box's final output. BEAUTIFUL MACHINE WOMAN LANGUAGE is the crash site of individual and empire, the smoke still twisting before the poet's eyes; fire deep in their throat."--Douglas Kearney

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQ+ Studies. Women's Studies.

Catherine Chen is a multidisciplinary poet and performer. They have received fellowships from Theater Mitu, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Arts Center Residency 2021), Lambda Literary, Poets House, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their poems appear in The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Apogee, Nat. Brut, among others. Chen is the author of the chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks, 2019). They live in Brooklyn.