Not Us Now
In
her
vertiginous
second
collection,
Zoë
Hitzig
delivers
an
astonishing
act
of
ventriloquy
in
reverse
–
speaking
no
t
through
the
voice
of
a
singular,
lyric
“I,”
but
through
a
consciousness
that
seems
to
have
amassed
itself
out
of
the
detritus
of
human
life.
The
future
world
of
Not
Us
Now
is
remembered
in
an
even
further
future,
where
language
is
both
the
survivor
and
the
cargo
of
an
earthly
wreckage.
Crushed
under
the
weight
of
collection
and
storage,
what
remains
are
those
records
of
human
curiosity,
habit,
and
longing
which
have
increasingly
formed
the
information
economies
of
the
present.
What
are
we
doing
to
language
and
ourselves
as
we
extract
more
and
more
material
for
questionable
optimization?
What
will
the
appetite
of
a
controlled,
controlling
public
erode
from
the
private?
Across
a
series
of
elliptical,
siren
-
like
poems
and
sequences,
Hitzig
performs
an
urgent
lyric
intervention,
recovering
defiance
from
our
accumulating
raw
-
data
footprints.
With
equal
measures
of
method
and
entropy,
Not
Us
Now
presents
the
chorus
we
are
hurtling
toward,
our
own
voices
in
the
future
issuing
a
plea
for
a
new
course.
Zoë
H
itzig
is
the
author
of
two
books
of
poetry,
Mezzanine
(Ecco,
2020)
and
Not
Us
Now,
winner
of
the
Changes
Book
Prize
(Changes,
2024).
She
currently
serves
as
poetry
editor
of
The
Drift.
“There
was
no
need
to
dream
it;
I
could
feel
my
organic
machine
taking
in
each
of
Zoë
Hitzig’s
remarkable
poems