Human Resources: Poems

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resourcesa sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

Human Resources The speaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin care, though she dreams about the department / that women get reassigned to after they file / harassment complaints. With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but for their own-where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human Resources the minds programming our present and future to consider what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human, Stevenson writes: I want to say better.