Systems Failure

In Mezzanine (2020), the poet’s debut, Zoë Hitzig navigates a world of glitches and malfunctions, where the shapes and structures of late capitalism are beginning to show signs of strain. From consumer buying habits and manufacturing mishaps to environmental exploitation and wrongful convictions, Hitzig exposes the oddly illogical and frequently damaging patterns of (so-called) civilisation, noting the paradoxes and oxymorons of our ‘self-inducing / covenant’, where ‘self-inducing’ might as easily read self-inflicted. ‘But now it’s late’, suggests the speaker of the grimly titled ‘How We Programmed the Apocalypse’, ‘Too late to unstate our / importance. And besides, the crickets died for this’, a bleakly, blackly comic vantage point from which we mourn ‘the soon unseen’, unable – or unwilling – to do anything about it. ‘[S]o convinced are we of / our own demise’, concludes the opening poem, ‘we devise it.’

Four years on, in Not Us Now, Hitzig’s poems address us from beyond the moment of collapse, transmitting from a future in which only scraps of nature, language and humanity remain, cobbling together utterance and meaning from a place of scarcity and near-exhaustion. It’s as though the poems have been tasked to recreate our present moment from a kit containing damaged parts, crucial pieces lost or missing: ‘there were cougars here, and glaciers’, recalls one of several ‘Fieldnotes’, stalking the terrain for clues, piecing life together like a whodunit detective. ‘Technodysmorphia’ borrows the language of internet status codes, twice deploying an all-too-familiar ‘404 Error’, which indicates that a webpage is unavailable or ‘dead’. When encountered online, these errors often ...