Manual Random Hill
Praise for Manual Random Hill
Many books talk about the impact of technology and media on our daily lives, but few give us new ways of finding human ground through technology and media. Manual Random Hill, Patrick Williams’ remarkable debut, delivers tight, nostalgia-free poems about an analog world slowly weaving itself into the digital fabric of our daily lives. Williams reveals intellectually sharp, intimate and deeply human shapes hidden in the seemingly mundane interactions of our screen-focused and off-screen lives. The poems work to deftly remediate the constant presence of data around us and remind us that “You & I are merely squatters/on the tiniest parcel of joint and muscle/pain.” Manual Random Hill is a remedy we sorely need. —Sean M. Conrey, author of The Book of Trees (Saint Julian Press, 2017)
Patrick Williams’s poems generously track the inaudible pulses, rowdy beeps, and silent collapses occurring at the interface between people and their tools: “When you look at me I feel like a newborn / mini drone tangled tightly in your sister’s hair.” The losses in this book may at first seem invisible and mundane, but Williams’ meticulous craft delivers their profound weight. So grieve when “[e]very tinny robocall / timeshifts to voicemail and is marked unheard,” and then “remember / how payphones once told us / to wait and listen.” Williams has built these poems tenderly to move us towards one another, toward the reality of the state of our planet, and to call us to attention. These are urgent poems of connection right when we need them: “Just know that when I write “Take care,” says Williams, “what I mean you to read is “survive.”–Jesse Nissim, author of Day cracks between the bones of the foot (Furniture Press Books, 2015) and Where They Would Never Be Invited (Black Radish Books, 2016)
Sample of the poems
Leave Me Your Slide Rule
Static charges are given an effective path
to the ground thanks to the strip of plastic
warming in your loafer. Something to prevent
the snap death of supercomputers who hum
and crunch as we walk among them, you
explained. I knew it then: to live with such
vulnerability demanded systemic finesse
I’d never muster. I mean, imagine catching
hell for all that data’s fluky ruin. Your every
working moment militarized, each day built
of spillable secrets future you’d wish he never
had to know. Think, Smash! is your thought balloon
in that college-era caricature, pencil behind ear.
You are the ne plus ultra of operations research.
Your Kind Attention Please
A children’s book should not reveal
our planet to hurtle forever in a corkscrew
motion. Or any objects to move in two
or more directions at once. Just like you
should not tell me the vacation spot
I mention was mostly destroyed by last
month’s floods. We already sent the deposit.
The clever food and beverage pairings
are lost on most patrons as they behold
your dinky illusions. Some have even left
their over-cushioned barstools to marvel
at the cardboard box of pale deer bones
carefully placed on the lip of the stage.
New Telegraphy
Forget those stylish communiqués
shilling synthetic facial hair and framed
giclées of suburban drugstore aisles.
If you succeed, you will soon bask in glory.
In this method, what you eventually learn
is that you are the instrument.
Most of the variance is explained
by you. Try wishing that away.
When we share line-of-sight, you’ll realize.
I am a famous actor’s skeleton.
You know him, he’s talking aliens
on video loop at the Duty Free.
I am all the unenclosed space
in Shannon’s Schematic Diagram
of a General Communication System.
That’s figure one in the original text.
In our version, most of the boxes have
been replaced with latex horror masks.
Where once were one-way arrows
now are knotty bootlaces.
In the center, the small nameless box
does not change. It is our index.
It is our compass rose. Remember, it’s eight-
to-one bits of English text to entropy.
You will also learn not to mention
something’s validity since we don’t
really use that term, despite what
you have probably read. It’s suspect.
I am the instrument. I am suspect.
I am the season’s last snowball,
saved in the freezer until it’s clear
and far too hard to dream of throwing.
Rental Period
Borrow a quarter and press
your face to the steel. Steady
the scope on the ramps and lifts
at thirteen degrees. That’s left.
The anxious ticking stands for time,
the silence for it’s up, for even
the iris of this soda straw of sense
is too much to take in for long.
Face the queue of other tourists.
Watch them pull what they can
of moments-older peaks before
each lease on the gaze expires.