By Michael Londra

Data Mind contains a spiritual blessing — it teaches us how to praise life in a universe that is so broken it is determined to erase our humanity.

Data Mind by Joanna Fuhrman. Curbstone Books, Northwestern University Press, 83 pp, $18.

“Historicity does not ensure relevance.” According to Jonathan Lethem, poet Stephen Sandy repeated this advice to his Bennington students for 35 years. Clarifying this point on a podcast about his time at the college, Lethem added, “Just because a thing really happened, doesn’t mean it’s going to be persuasive or interesting when you put it on the page.”

Sandy’s counsel holds true for all forms of aesthetic endeavor, especially now, when the seeming authenticity of direct personal narrative can endow humdrum work with unearned weight. The example of poet and Rutgers professor Joanna Fuhrman is an object lesson in how to overcome this failure of imagination. Connecting subjective experience to larger contexts of social, cultural, and political significance, Fuhrman continues to elevate individual historicity into wider universal relevance, as shown in Data Mind, her lively seventh collection of poetry.

Something of a departure from previous offerings, Data Mind is an ambitious poet’s concept album, a book-length unified field of prose poems that takes the internet as its muse: “I open my laptop and hear a million voices speaking to me at once” (from, “If a Menopausal Woman Dances in the Jungle and Nobody Films It”). Fuhrman distills complex ideas and attitudes into quick bursts of lyrical observations on our addictive digital world. Her short, dense blocks of lush language are tightly controlled and highly compressed, yet somehow Fuhrman manages to make her brief barbs feel deep as an oil well.

Splitting her material into sections prefaced by a black-and-white illustrated meme, Fuhrman riffs on how the internet impacts feminism (“IT’S STILL A LANGUAGE IF NOBODY UNDERSTANDS IT”); film (“THE FUTURE LEAKS INTO THE PAST”); and antidemocratic politics (“IF MY EYES ARE ACTUALLY WINDOWS, I’M HAPPY TO DRAW THE BLINDS”), among others. She recycles her memes as poem titles and scatters them throughout as embedded discrete lines. The effect is of an arrangement of reverberating echoes pinging off each other. This strategy resembles the braiding musical compositional technique rooted in reprise and restatement, generating fresh meanings with each new appearance.

Beginning with “The Algorithm Ate My Lunch,” Brooklyn-based Fuhrman immediately establishes a sharp-witted tone reminiscent of a native New Yorker’s sense of humor, satirical but not cynical: “I hung a sign that read ‘Hope’ on the taxidermied body of an owl and waited for applause.” Data Mind’s sharp comedy is always productive, a way of hacking into pain’s hard drive, rewiring grief from within. For example, Fuhrman acknowledges but refuses to give in to doomscrolling, in poems such as “Your Ick Is My Yum” and “How Many Internets Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb?”

Influenced by precursors like André Breton and John Ashbery, Fuhrman revels in unexpected surrealist juxtapositions. (Data Mind might wisecrackingly be retitled Dada Mind.) For her, poetry is tasty frosting, an edible truth that in turn eats you from within, as in “Poetica Fondant:”

I baked a cake shaped like the internet, and when I cut it open, everyone who tasted it said it tasted just like the internet, and I kept eating it, and eating it, and eating it … until the cake itself was the internet and I myself the somewhat delicious crumbs.

Indeed, Data Mind is a source of much food for thought. Women are disposable, our culture’s junk grub, in “Does This Data Make Me Look Fat?” as well as in this one-liner from “The Warriors:” “My childhood is dismantled and repacked as snacks.” Fuhrman explicitly combines misogyny and capitalism in “My American Name is Money”:

When you are a woman in the algorithmic state, everyone wants to taste your data, but you are unsure which of your limbs is data and which are twitching proofs of God.

Taking “algorithmic state” literally, Fuhrman elaborates it into a synonym for American male-dominated authoritarianism in “Barbie Attempts to Gain Control of the Algorithmic State” and “My Breast Squirts Milk at the Algorithmic State.” These poems are fun to read and very funny: more importantly, they are deadly serious critiques of our country’s brand of patriarchal fascism. “If a Menopausal Woman Dances in the Jungle and Nobody Films It” particularly elucidates this point, beginning in trauma, ending in beauty:

When one of the dancing arms crashes through the screen, becoming a barking Dogecoin, another arm morphs into jazz.

Data Mind humanizes sexist Hollywood clichés, its amendments turning them into more accurate depictions of women’s lived experience. In Fuhrman’s version of The Matrix, Smurfette becomes Carrie-Anne Moss’s character Trinity, a modification that better serves to embody warring feminist tensions:

I tried to explain to her that in the current version of fifty-first wave feminism, we hate violence, but her hands had already turned into boxing gloves. Despite my pleas, she swings them wildly into the binary code mustache of Burt Reynolds.

Despite these virtues, Data Mind has its defects. For one, it is too expansive. Culling ten or so pages, from a text of over seventy-five, would have streamlined its comic momentum, giving these wise and wonderful words even more impact. But this is quibbling with a work of genuine originality.

“Prequel” is a prime specimen of Fuhrman’s smarts:

The evening your torso becomes a TV tuned to Fox News, your memories are replaced with a laugh track… The more you yell, the harder it is for anyone to hear.

This sentiment dovetails into “Data Mind,” the final poem:

The joke that replaced our democracy kept waiting for the laugh track to return… The joke tap danced on the wall. The wall tap danced on the joke. I clapped my hands together as hard as I could, but I couldn’t make anything stop.

We are not living in the movies; Keanu and Schwarzenegger won’t be coming to rescue us. But we can look for solace in poems like “Not a Limit But a Frame,” which contain lines that tap into poetry’s capacity to transcend anguish, repurposing pain into something beautiful, even redemptive. Data Mind contains a spiritual blessing — it teaches us how to praise life in a universe that is so broken it is determined to erase our humanity:

I never thought my eyes would be capable of seeing in so many directions: inward, vertical, perpendicular, inward and—sometimes—even through.

Michael Londra’s poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Restless Messengers, Asian Review of Books, and The Fortnightly Review, among many others. He contributed six essays and the introduction to New Studies in Delmore Schwartz, coming soon from MadHat Press; and is author of the forthcoming Delmore&Lou: A Novel of Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed. He lives in Manhattan.