"I've loved poetry ever since my manager told me it was an option"
AfterThought: Poetry for a starving audience contains a collection of poems and satirical prose that examines with a crooked eye what it means to influence and to be influenced. We spend our days staring at screens obsessing about the lives of strangers-why? What are we looking for? Are we obsessed? Lonely?
Explore both sides of the glowing screen with these poems-perhaps you'll find what it is you're looking for.
Or perhaps it will find you.
In her debut poetry collection, Habbie Harlowe takes on the persona of a self-obsessed influencer to explore themes of parasocial relationships, longing and loneliness, narcissism, and self-absorption in the digital new media age.
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Excerpt
OLD FASHIONED
Forgetting is an old-fashioned thing
Some things don't want to be remembered
But we've got pictures, texts, emails, screenshots
To such a degree that everything is always happening
A beautiful smile from the past and that kiss by the water fountain
I could've spent a lifetime trying to remember it exactly right
The gift of memory unneeded when I could simply repeat it
Find that moment and treat it like it was just yesterday
It used to be phone calls answered on the first ring
Now we can scroll and swipe and never say a single thing
Lives are documented for the ages to look like we're living
Forgetting is an old-fashioned thing
AIRBRUSH
Written notes from hangnailed fingers
Moth eaten holes in sweaters for winter
Stinging toes from basement splinters
What you see on the screen
Is an incomplete picture
FAVE
You're always
On the trending page
In my heart
