In her first solo poetry book, Larissa In Automaton Biographies, Larissa Lai

automaton biographies
Lai (author of the novels When Fox is a machine-tools the poem as a mode of
Thousand and Salt Fish Girl) puts an ear to narrative invention into a neuro-spatial
the white noise of advertising, pop music, surveillance where words become the
CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology heat tiles of re-entry tumbling through
of English Literature, cereal packaging, atmospheres of cyborgian desire, cosmic
and MuchMusic as she explores the memory, prosthetic lament, and the
problem of what it means to exist on the
boundaries of the human. automaton biographies dictation of identity. Poetry like this is
just what we need for the invasion;
writing that honours the debris of the
The books consists of four long poems: imagination while it sustains the space
“rachel,” a meditation in the voice of the labs of attention.
cyborg figure Rachel from Ridley Scott’s —FRED WAH
film Blade Runner and its source material,
poems
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Part exoskeletal enjambment, part
Electric Sheep?; “nascent fashion,” which shared soft biology, Automaton
addresses contemporary war and its Biographies wends through creative
excesses; “ham,” which circulates around industries and uncommon commons,
the chimpanzee named Ham sent up into picking up the shards of both our
space as part of the Mercury Redstone latent futures and our Polaroid pasts.
missions by NASA in the 1960s and later Larissa Lai jacks into a sound system
donated to the Coulston Foundation for here that is already spinning everything
biomedical research; and “auto matter,” from White Zombie to Elton John. Her
a kind of unfolding autobiography told in stanzas, staccato and severe, deftly kern

Larissa Lai
poems. our ears to new iTunes and weTunes,
creating poems that are simultaneously
Ambitious and eloquent, these poems partial, powerful, and ever-emerging
taken as a whole are a personal and from the post-industrial landscapes
cultural history that jostles us out of where new technologies and alienated
our humanness and into our relations labor continue to collide.
to animal, machine, language, and one —MARK NOWAK
another.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS

arsenalpulp.com

Poetry
$19.95 Canada | $17.95 US
ISBN 978-1-55152-292-0
Larissa Lai
automaton biographies
automaton
biographies

Larissa Lai

Arsenal Pulp Press

Vancouver
AUTOMATON BIOGRAPHIES
Copyright © 2009 by Larissa Lai

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any
form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior
written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief
excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from
Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS

Suite 200, 341 Water Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6B 1B8
arsenalpulp.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and
the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Develop-
ment Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book
Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.

Cover illustration by Keith Langergraber

Book design by Shyla Seller

Printed and bound in Canada on FSC-certified paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lai, Larissa, 1967-

Automaton biographies / Larissa Lai.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55152-292-0

I. Title.
PS8573.A3775A87 2009 C811’.54 C2009-903749-1

ISBN, digital edition: 978-1-55152-358-3

four eyes
contents

9 / rachel

43 / nascent fashion

85 / ham

123 / auto matter

165 / acknowledgments
rachel
It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human
and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what is body in machines that
resolve into coding practices … There is no fundamental, ontological separation
in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.
The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the
image of cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion.

—Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Look, it’s me with my mother.

—Rachel, Blade Runner

11
·

2019 and all’s well

i tower my mythic birth
my father’s a doll maker
his algorithms spill life
more human than human

i dream an ethic
pure as lieder
pale as north
moth before industrialization

we manage our doric columns

even the sun
the way light tumbles
through our boardroom
rues our mumbly owl

light gold flecks our eyes flutter

wisdom of inward sisters

13
·

a chilly mortal
but mortal still
i’m all business
here to demonstrate perfection

my father’s enterprise
rations my emotional response time
pupil is the empty space
through which light passes

my retina imprint
such photosensitive paper

14
·

i camp policeman
testing cold because the accident
nothing really wrong
he hides what he can’t bear

i well against his

emotional calfskins
his killing jar
his girlie magazine’s
gooey centre

15
·

i half my memory
what’s past is polaroid

i collect water in ditches

my body ticks out
its even rhythm too flawless
for birth

i athena my own sprouting

this knowledge colds me
in my ice-fringed room
my asian fits this frost

i owl my blink
slow stare i thought was mine
father given

my heart exudes a kind of love

a kind of mourning

16