Human Resources: Poems

(Hardback)

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Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevensons Human Resourcesa sobering and perceptive portrait of technologys impact on connection and power.

Human Resources The speaker of Stevensons poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their ownwhere they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human Resources the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: I want to say better.

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Praise for Human Resources

Ryann Stevensons debut collection Human Resources captures the eerie, Black Mirror feeling that weve already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . Stevenson has a deadpan human to counteract the surreality: Last night was a first: I screamed out loud / when trying to scream in a dream. . . . We get the dialogue backward, as in Martin Amiss novel Times Arrow, in which a Nazi lives his life again from death to birth. Both a nightmare and a fantasy, this undoing. I want to go back and change my answer, Stevenson writestoo late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us.Elisa Gabbert, New York Times

In Human Resources, the speaker is often isolated, even as shes building technology thats supposed to help connect people. Much of this isolation, the poet conveys, came from [Stevenson] being a woman in a male-dominated industry . . . By thinking about connecting with an unknown being on the other side of a screen or speaker, Stevenson addresses a kind of detachment that is a result of modern technology. And yet, by thinking of the womans role in a male-dominated space, she joins a sisterhood of poets who bravely capture the feeling of female isolation.NPRs Morning Edition

"Here is the past without robot screens, and here is the future that we cannot but try to anticipate through them. It is memorable then, while anticipating, that the person who designs AI throughout Human Resources does not always look at her own screens but, more often, through other windows, with the 'neighbors TV / flashing silently, / as if he were still awake.Ploughshares

Stevensons darkly comic and unsettling poems reveal the sexism and isolation of Big Tech. But Human Resources explores how our humanity asserts itself even as we attempt to mimic it in a more perfect replica.NPR, Books We Love

"The lyric explorations in Stevenson's beautifully discriminating bookof self and soul, femininity and society, the peculiarities and intricacies of 'design' within nature and cultureare stunned, fine-minded testimonies. In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability."Sandra Lim

The controlled anxiety of the present is captured brilliantly by this wary, lucid book. We live in an era when our humanness is worn downby virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and leadso we must practice mindfulness to keep from losing track of who we are. This brave, tough book suggests that flowering maples, yoga, orcas, and the hands of our mothers might help us preserve our innocence.Human Resourcesis a lyric transcript of what it is to be a citizen at a punishing time.Henri Cole

Author Bio

Ryann Stevenson is the author of Human Resources. Her poems have appeared inthe Adroit Journal,American Letters & Commentary,Bennington Review,Columbia Poetry Review,Cortland Review,Denver Quarterly, andLinebreak, among others.She lives in Oakland, California.