New book next year!❤️🔥🖥️📎📁📈🔪
And new poem right now!
My new poetry chapbook, THAT DOES NOT RESONATE WITH ME, is coming out in 2027 with Game Over Books! I’m so excited and can’t wait to share more soon. Here is a screenshot of the cover art mood board, which may or may not actually inform the cover:
THAT DOES NOT RESONATE WITH ME is part corporate surrealism, part technofascism survival guide, and explores work and sex and the ways we exploit each other.1 But it’s fun too! The title is all caps, unless Game Over Books tells me that that’s a bit much, in which case the title will be normal title caps.
Game Over Books was my top choice for this manuscript and the first place I sent it to. They’ve published some of my favorite poetry collections of the past 5 years and seem to have an affinity for subject matter that is kind of strange, niche, ugly, or otherwise hard to place. They seemed like a perfect fit for my angry little office-siren-song of a book. I also enjoy Game Over’s ethos of like, giving a shit about public health and imagining a more equitable future.
I’ll share more in the coming months, but for now, I have a new poem out!
Me and Microsoft Teams
“Why You Typed That on Microsoft Teams” is in the latest issue of MIDLVLMAG. It’s also going to be in THAT DOES NOT RESONATE WITH ME and is actually the oldest poem in the chapbook. It tries to answer why people have said various things to me via Microsoft Teams messages. As previously discussed, people do not stop saying weird shit to me, but especially men, and especially at work. I know this is a near-universal experience, so I tried to capture my variation on that theme here.
I am a longtime enjoyer of MIDLVLMAG. They’re a literary magazine about work and jobs and stuff. Many mastheads and writers try to hide the fact that they make money doing something other than their creative practice, so I find this focus refreshing. This issue’s theme is “reverse evaluation,” so like a performance review but in the other direction. Love that.
Microsoft Teams and I go way back. It was the first platform of its kind I ever used—my first-ever office job adopted it shortly after I started. Since then, my workplace messaging platform has flickered between Teams and Slack and Discord, depending on the company. But there’s always been something particularly sinister about Teams, even before I knew Microsoft is genocide's bestest boy. I think this feeling stems from its aggressively soothing purple + (until recently) limited emoji offerings + architecture that seems to discourage open discussion compared to its competitors.
It is a universally acknowledged truth that married dudes are feral for boygirls
There is a pattern in my career:
I interact with guy at work
Guy DMs me a few artsy thoughts, due to my Slightly Alt Aura (my personality’s watered-down free tier)
I persevere and respond minimally (“i’ll check out those eight YouTube videos”)
Guy starts telling me all his fears with a level of emotional intimacy I’ve only ever felt toward my partner, my childhood stuffed animal, or my favorite troll2
I continue responding minimally
Guy gets bored and executes his exit plan
These men are always older, always married to a woman in what appears to be a monogamous relationship, and often very curious about Gender™. I don’t mean to be blasting anyone for trying to make real human connections at work—the main problem is that step 6, the exit plan, is usually him doing sexual harassment.
In an odd coincidence, “Why You Typed That on Microsoft Teams” was published on the 9-year anniversary of this shining example:
This dude was really, really into pretending I was his child:
The rest of my screenshots folder is less one-sided Lolita LARPing and more just like… rapid oversharing with a sexual bent. But the persistence of this trend across companies, fields, and modes of work continues to fascinate me, piss me off, and probably foster some kind of complex where I have to be the most fuckable court jester on the Zoom call. This poem attempts to unpack all that a little.
Much like TDNRWM as a whole, I consider it a feel-bad romp about self-censorship and transactionality! Enjoy!
Sorry in advance for the number of times I will be repeating this description. I’ve tried to find different or more succinct ways to explain it, but this is all I’ve got.
