Can We Anything We See - Softcover

Bresner, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1963908686 ISBN 13: 9781963908688

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

Catherine Bresner’s Can We Anything We See initiates a new mode of ekphrasis in the postinternet age. In this long poem, Bresner explores the ways in which current technologies, specifically artificial intelligence, outline the uncanny valley of speculative thought and shape a sense of personhood. In lines that sometimes act as captions or ciphers (or both), Bresner allows for the caesuras of breath and contemplation, in consideration of the digital landscape human beings currently find themselves in. Simultaneously present, prescient, and timeless, Can We Anything We See invites infinite readings.

“Catherine Bresner’s keyword unlocking a speculative ekphrasis, or doing to ‘cloud’ what a prompted AI does to a human hand, messing it uncannily, making strange in its interpretive drift.”
—Douglas Kearny, author of Sho

“This is gorgeously inventive and important work.”
—Hannah Brooks-Motl, author of Earth and M

“What we find at the edge is not just the vertiginous horror of unchecked sight, but a site of possible subjectivity: ‘outside the I space.’”
—Chris Campanioni,
author of VHS and The Internet is for Real

About this title

About the Author

Catherine Bresner is the author of the chapbooks The Merriam Webster Series (2012) Some Break A / Others Say Do (forthcoming 2024, Press Brake); the artist book Everyday Eros (Mount Analogue 2017); and the poetry collection the empty season, which won the Diode Edition Book Prize in 2017. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in FENCE, the VOLT, b l u s h, Denver Quarterly, Sixth Finch, Fonograf, Iterant, The Offing, Paperbag and elsewhere. Currently, she is the publicist for Wave Books and co-edits Spirit Duplicator, a biannual mimeograph magazine of poetry and art, with the poet Adam Tobin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1963908686
• ISBN 13: 9781963908688
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 86