To Look After and use by Leah Falk

To Look After and Use (Finishing Line Press, September 2019) uses the life and work of Alan Turing, as well as his mother Sara’s biography of him after his untimely death in 1954, as a departure point for considerations of mortality, faith, family connections, and memory. Moving in and out of several perspectives, the collection studies the human dimensions of highly abstract problem-solving, asking what we reveal about ourselves in the process of trying to isolate and reproduce uniquely human habits of being.

Leah Falk‘s To Look After and Use enacts the ways in which the mind questions the world around us to demystify its secrets. Composed of close ups that not only indicate the intimate but also that illuminate the larger world we live in, Falk uses the narrative of Alan Turing to discuss the courage we hear in “the universal song” of us. Promising through “memory, you can access/ any element/ and not jostle another,” she delivers on the promise in some of the most compelling, lucid lines I’ve read in recent memory. Read To Look After and Use with me, and trust it will sharpen the focus on life in ways for which you didn’t realize you needed permission. There’s more truth found in one line of these poems than in the reading of an entire collection. Rest assure: “The Impossible Problem” has been solved!

–Van Jordan

In this wonderfully intelligent book, Leah Falk explores and repeatedly crosses the permeable border between the body and the machine we call the computer. The life and work of Alan Turing, founder of modern computer science, provide a narrative thread that’s loose enough to allow a rich variety of concerns. The machine, dubbed “universal” by Turing, becomes animal, with a “fossil record”; animal becomes machine, “writing [a] script” into its child’s body. And what of the human animal, and of Falk herself? A poem, said Williams, is “a machine made out of words.” But the machine of this book is a body, too, one the reader will greet with increasing pleasure on each exploration of the poet’s exquisite language and challenging thought.

–Martha Collins