Long-time Ricepaper contributor, writer, and UBC English professor,
Larissa Lai brings us Automaton Biographies. Larissa's new book of poetry consists of four long poems: “Rachel,” a meditation in the voice of the cyborg figure Rachel from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; “nascent fashion,” which addresses contemporary war and its excesses; “Ham,” which circulates around the chimpanzee named Ham sent up into space as part of the Mercury Redstone missions by NASA in the 1960s and later donated to the Coulston Foundation for biomedical research; and “auto matter,” a kind of unfolding autobiography told in poems.
