If a tweet goes un-retweeted, does it make a sound? 

Are You There, Samantha Fain’s first full-length poetry collection, interrogates the lonesomeness contained within our algorithms and transforms it into something beautiful. The collection’s title refers to the pesky Netflix screen that pops up, say, when you’ve been binge-watching Love Island. The device reaches out, humanlike, to poke you out of your depressive revelry: You okay? Sure, it might make you feel a little empty inside. But, if you look at it under a certain blue-screened light, it’s kind of sweet, isn’t it? 

Fain’s poems scavenge sources such as indie music, reality TV, and search engines, ushering the age-old art of the lament into a modern context. Fain probes our digital landscapes and current catastrophes to explore both personal and collective loneliness. Language is the outstretched hand, rubbed raw to the bone but still grasping out for contact in spite of it all. And what is a lament, after all, but a hard-felt expression of yearning?

Fain’s poetry recasts the lament as a translative act, an attempt to traverse an absence or divide. In “whale poetica,” the opening piece, Fain writes: “in poems, we echolocate / the feelings.” Here, Fain takes the premise of the Google search “why are whales dying,” and spins her query into an examination of social bonds, the inevitability of death, and the importance of poetry—of the attempt itself:

i want a pod
to nestle in,
someone’s tongue
between my plates of teeth,

a language to meet me
in the middle of the ocean & hold
my hand so i don’t float alone.

Poetry is the lifejacket with which Fain attempts to resuscitate her connection to others. Poetry is not only “the fat that warms me,” but also an enduring art form that might “travel further than where my feet go.” The poem is a conduit for connection—a different, and perhaps melancholic, simulacrum for physical contact, but a touching one nonetheless. 

Many of the poems in Are You There concern the pratfalls of communication and the challenges of clear articulation. In “Elegy for _______,” Fain exhumes the grief behind the walls of text we’ve built around ourselves. The struggle begins within the title itself, simultaneously a reference to the censoring or redaction of words and to the loss of the subject being elegized. The word-loss and sense of bereavement converge as the poem reads:

When you lose the word for sadness,
you say instead, I am
exhausted.

You search for synonyms
in waxes, berries,
little pauses of weather,

punch your sleeping muscles
in an effort to remember—

& the fade comes faster.

Sadness. Sad. S—
soundless.

The poem devolves into em dashes and false starts—an “alphabet gone, longing.” In this way, Fain illustrates how words function as containers for emotion, and how they are woefully limited to the four walls of their fixed meaning, at least until the poet reimagines them. It is through this creative wordplay that Fain’s poems take on their deeper resonance.

In “our language of accidents,” Fain deploys autocorrect as a poetic device to locate meaning. When writing a text to her beloved, “angel” becomes “angle,” and “both are true”: 

at the end of each night
we find one another
in every mistake we are lucky enough
to own—this backwards network of skies

patched together by text & throats.

Through this digital alchemy, the autocorrected words contain as much truth as their originals, creating a new framework for understanding the universal truths of pulling away and coming back together. Words illuminate meaning even as they obscure it, resulting in an updated lexicon that is truer than the sum of its parts. 

Through the application of technology towards language, a modernized schema emerges. For example, for some of the poem titles, Fain employs a random word generator to coax out new meanings with which to contextualize the piece. In “Ode to my phone, who thinks all my friendships never end,” Fain takes this concept even further, describing the technology itself as its own autonomous force, capable of a unique kind of love:

I believe the Internet knows how to love relentlessly more
than anyone else, how to keep grasping what wants to leave.
Don’t delete the data. I like dreaming of our information
still floating & holding hands while we both sleep.

Fain imagines information sustaining its own romance, independent of the humans who originally produced the data. And somehow, this is a comforting thought: an enduring element of love that we humans cannot mess up. Through this blurring of boundaries, we find expansiveness. This refractive act operates both on the cellular level of the words themselves and on the macro level of the emotions that the words express. 

Much like white space in a poem, Fain’s use of technology and wordplay highlight our psychic absences, those gaping spaces of emptiness that may be a grim necessity of modern life. And yet, blossoming within these holes something novel emerges—new words forged by machines, new angles discovered in our careless mistakes. It is lament reimagined at its messiest and its finest.

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