Internet Girls by JSA Lowe

Internet Girls is a work of genius, the kind of genius that unsettles you and challenges you and cheers you as you stumble in the wake of it. Lowe’s poems rattle and wobble and keep opening up, refusing nothing, despairing and celebrating and despairing again—and then joking about the despair. The poems boil over the way a mind boils over at 3 am of a sleepless night—with fears and worries and sudden jolts of insight. Things I come to these poems for: The range of reference (from Fortinbras to Trazodone), the flash of language (and the unplumbable depths in the afterflash), the ear for the music of experience, the philosophical and psychological astuteness, the laughter-in-the-face-of-it-all, the brittle keening on the brink of every danger. These poems won’t protect us or save us; they’ll take us, as Denis Johnson once wrote, “straight into the heart of the trouble” which might finally be where we need to be.

–Jon Davis

By turns notational, fluid, imploring, and unruly, Internet Girls emanates with a brand of joy—élan vital meets “blister & filth” brimming with everyday intimacy. In lines that mirror a caustic sense of self, the poems reflect immediacy of mind as being “alright with my fight / fine by my fears and my queers and my tangles.” So addressed to lovers, friends, specters of youth, persons estranged, companions in art, search-engine fantasies, and the locus of the poem itself, this writing suddenly seizes you in the intervals between craving, craft, sentence, and scene—matchless “in the grim local minimum / of the night.”

–Roberto José Tejada

These are poems of existential loss and heartbreak, weighed down by a heavy psychic burden, yet they keep showing up, through Lowe’s crystalline language, to make some sense of the shards, and in the face of barely believing it possible. Or maybe they are not even poems, maybe they are something else, something new—maybe a transcription of dreams, or of an inner monologue that began a long time ago and will go on into the future, the way all sound is a wave that just keeps pushing outward, into the universe, forever…that’s what it feels like, reading JSA Lowe.

–Nick Flynn