Are You There

Featured in the Guardian best recent poetry

schrödinger writes to einstein in his letters:

on my bad days, i exist
in double-states—awestruck
by my wreckage.

In Are You There, Indiana poet Samantha Fain refracts contemporary melancholia into iridescent lyricism. Fain delights in breaking rules, the serendipity of autocorrect incantations, testing how far, in space and time, a connection will travel, and where it ends—quoting sources including Schrödinger, Ask Jeeves and Kim Kardashian. In Fain’s haunting poetics, grief, mania, pop culture, faith, quantum physics and digital relationships collide, alive with the spiky humour of brutal self-awareness, aglow with startling new language.

“These poems are like Neosporin; they sting and they heal.”
Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman

“The most lyrically provoking debut I’ve ever read. Samantha Fain articulates the complex contemporary manifestations of grief and desire, while still giving us possibility instead of foreclosure.” C.T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking