Human Resources

By Ryann Stevenson and Henri Cole

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize: A “darkly comic and unsettling” portrait of a woman working in AI, and technology’s impact on connection and power (NPR, “Books We Love”).

Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. She workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” whom her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot. The speaker of these 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.” Chilling, lucid, sharply intelligent, Human Resources challenges 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.”

“Human Resources captures the eerie, ‘Black Mirror’ feeling that we’ve already crossed some A.I. event horizon . . . ‘I want to go back and change my answer,’ Stevenson writes—too late for that! Or, to paraphrase Kafka: Plenty of hope, but not for us.” —The New York Times

“In a time of cold virtual ecosystems and lightweight psychological theories and remedies, Human Resources speaks for mystery and vulnerability.” —Sandra Lim

“We live in an era when our humanness is worn down—by virtual beings, bots, synced devices, battery life, data, radiation, sulfates, and lead—so 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.” —Henri Cole

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639550432

Book preview

I

INTERIOR LIFE

There’s a fly in the house I can’t kill.

I won’t know if it’s real until I kill it.

It darts through my periphery as my internet

yogi tells me that a cow

can be an opening. I turn my mat

to face the window

so I can see the tree on fire,

the red maple, but a truck that reads

MOVING? is in the way.

Imagine yourself as a child

watching, says the yogi, which I never

want to remember—

everything I had to watch.

I don’t let her finish.

What she wanted was for me to take up space,

something about reclaiming joy

by thinking of my favorite childhood

TV program. Later, I give it a try

while folding laundry,

The Real Housewives of somewhere

on high volume to dominate

the persistent buzzing

in my ear. A Dwell

magazine placed on the back

of my husband’s shirt

helps me get a proper fold.

Am I taking up space, with the proper fold?

In my house clothes I get on the floor

into extended child’s pose and reach

for the cow opening. I press an ear

to the wood and listen for something

in another room,

in another house. What I hear

is a long conversation about me

that I didn’t begin.

I hear my own voice from a distance:

I don’t want to say the words of what happened.

Some days I’m floating around and don’t know it

until I break the French press again.

BEAUTY MASK

I was hired to design the voices of virtual beings. The first thing my boss taught me was trust must be established immediately between user and bot. This will never happen if the eyelashes are wrong, he insisted as we workshopped Nia’s face—an intelligent avatar we were contracted to create for a teaching proof of concept. The requirements were few: female, racially ambiguous, unique mouth animation for every letter, head without a neck preferred. He looked at her, said she was his type. Like all of our avatars, Nia was