Automaton Biographies

In Automaton Biographies, Larissa Lai machine-tools the poem as a mode of narrative invention into a neuro-spatial surveillance where words become the heat tiles of re-entry tumbling through atmospheres of cyborgian desire, cosmic memory, prosthetic lament, and the dictation of identity. Poetry like this is just what we need for the invasion; writing that honours the debris of the imagination while it sustains the space labs of attention. -Fred Wah

Part exoskeletal enjambment, part shared soft biology, Automaton Biographies wends through creative industries and uncommon commons, picking up the shards of both our latent futures and our Polaroid pasts. Larissa Lai jacks into a sound system here that is already spinning everything from White Zombie to Elton John. Her stanzas, staccato and severe, deftly kern our ears to new iTunes and weTunes, creating poems that are simultaneously partial, powerful, and ever-emerging from the post-industrial landscapes where new technologies and alienated labor continue to collide.-Mark Nowak

Automaton Biographies reckons with matters of identity and questions what it is to be human in our current geopolitcal and technological contexts. -Quill and Quire

[Larissa Lai's] playful pulling of pop lyrics and manipulation of movie scenarios are filtered through the depth and importance of documenting possible shifts in what it means to be human in an era of increasing technologization.... She pulls the globalized advertising image to the surface so that it operates outside of media function, and we can actually see the social world in which we live, not the peoplesoft version that is continually constructed for us to see. -The Georgia Straight

Lai makes her point with a precise and emotive execution of rhythm, flow, and diction. What evolves is an unwavering commitment to language and honesty. -make/shift

The world is revealed as a circus in Lai's book - "barnum" becomes a verb here - vertiginous, illusory, distracting, surreal; but importantly the work disallows our spectatorship, insists that we grab the trapeze and swing in to speak, question, act. -Canadian Literature