Objects of Code and Desire
Copyright © 1997 ASGP / LeeAnn Heringer

ISBN 1-888431-11-3

Welcome to a book of days, a saga, a diary of a nascent Silicon Valley start-up, as told by its top-notch software engineer, one of those people who make companies and products deliver on all the vapor-ware which makes the brave new world hazy -- and who just happens to be a poet, a woman.

Oooh, irresistible, you say already. But this is not just that. This is a book of measured diction, lucid, calm, frank and astute, a precis of study and emotion.

Follow the author through the routine and the wrenching. Feel what it feels like to be in those offices, to argue at those meetings, to be asked for impossible commitments, to walk the walk in those shoes, to work in exasperation and long-distance endurance caged at front of those unforgiving keyboards and screens, those terrible mirrors for our constructions' failings, under deadlines.

The book transcends its own story; its poems leap out into our worlds, tugging at our sleaves from here and there, like begging children, like mendicants after a piece of our already made-up minds. The poems insinuate themselves into our minds in cahoots with our own memories, becoming our reawakening, more than a story, our primal longing.

uncle dean and the cockroach

i got trapped in the corner
with the only other non-mother
at sam's first birthday party
listening to the details of the lube job
she did on her father's '74 dodge van
and i watched you
so good with other people's children
so handy at twisting the mcdonald's happy meal
giant cockroach toy into the evil superhero
that people don't ask if we have children
but rather how many.

and i wish we could talk about it,
wish that we weren't both so sure
the other was to blame that
our tongues swell with remorse
in the back of our throats
and can only lick the edges of the answer --

no. no children.

Copyright © April 1997 LeeAnn Heringer

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Copyright © 1997 A Small Garlic Press. All rights reserved.
Created 1997/5/7. Updated last on 2008/5/2.