cover image Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics

Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics

Edited by Andrew Ridker. Black Ocean (SPD, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (200p) ISBN 978-1-939568-07-6

Framing the gathered poems in what Ridker calls "The Age of Surveillance"%E2%80%94of Chelsea Manning, Trayvon Martin, Google Glass, drones, and camera phones%E2%80%94this anthology becomes as much a surveillance of a certain type of contemporary poetry as it is contemporary poetry about surveillance. The selected poets, most of whom contribute only a single piece, belong to various schools and styles. They include the heights of critical success, poets with recent debut collections, and the full range between. Some poems read like essays; some like short stories. Several writers head unflinchingly into the political, while others approach surveillance as a private concern (albeit one that almost always reaches the political), even using their work to survey the self, or the poem. Yet despite how much it accomplishes, this survey of poetry doesn't see as widely as it might like%E2%80%94most obviously, to fill an anthology with such a dominant amount of white writers while invoking Trayvon Martin and surveillance politics in the introduction evidences both an oversight and a significant narrowing of scope, experience, and aesthetics. On the strength of the individual poems, however, and the necessity of using language to investigate our often distressing political and technological moment, the anthology earns its spot on the shelf. (Aug.)