3. “I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy”

K. Lorraine Graham’s Terminal Humming from Edge Books  has some sentences and some not sentences, has poems but maybe more some poetry.   At first I thought that it was rigorously poly-vocal, and then I thought something like “It cannot be poly-vocal if it lacks vocality.”  So it is poly-what?  Poly-focal?  Is that a type of glasses?  Or  maybe “poly dripping off language from everything else.”

It is helpful the first section is called:

 “IF THIS ISN’T AN INTERVIEW I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.”

Also it is helpful that the book is called Terminal Humming, because overall it has the effect of a noise that isn’t speech, exactly, though coming from near that speech-making place:

“there is this humming in the air now like an open test to evaluate everything welling up in everybody.”

The humming has to do with data and stupidity, that stupidity of the world and the stupidity of work and also the humming of stupid men and their data and very many stupid women and their data, too:

“the revolution / is building and any day now the data/ entry supervisors are gonna get it / and we’re gonna get all the data and then and then  . .”

And then, what?  “We exchanged extensive voice mails.” Who knows, really: bookcases, badinage, bubbly, cheese straws and “rival conflicting rules.” “Poly-noisish” doesn’t seem like it could be a word. The book makes zero promises, except maybe that one about covering self-defense &

Banished from the database, angels
fallen remain beautiful, non-
essential not quite irrelevant.