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A Machine Wrote This Song
Poetry. Equal parts definition and destruction of language as material, Jennifer Hayashida's A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG challenges us to examine what constitutes meaningful communication. In Hayashida's first collection of poems, we are invited to experience the loss of translation (between languages, generations, and geographies) with a tender scrupulousness. The speakers in A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG are hooked on phenomenology in an attempt to understand competing scales of intimacy and violence, continuity and interruption.
A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG gives us the linguistic tools to examine our reality as an infinite series of connected concepts. Hayashida creates gentle tension by highlighting the synchronicities of experience, for motherhood / war, machination / art, memory / strategy, syntax / feeling. Throughout the collection, we are reminded to both revere and question our personal and collective relationship to the histories we embody through our "This poem is / history without geography / You are / Interrupted Fern / This poem is / a dry-docked vessel / We are / a homemade dictionary."
A MACHINE WROTE THIS SONG gives us the linguistic tools to examine our reality as an infinite series of connected concepts. Hayashida creates gentle tension by highlighting the synchronicities of experience, for motherhood / war, machination / art, memory / strategy, syntax / feeling. Throughout the collection, we are reminded to both revere and question our personal and collective relationship to the histories we embody through our "This poem is / history without geography / You are / Interrupted Fern / This poem is / a dry-docked vessel / We are / a homemade dictionary."
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2018
22 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 28, 2018
"A Machine Wrote this Song
People live in stations like they never had mothers or fathers
National Guardsmen in chubby camouflage pixels
Fit moms with legs like parentheses worry restroom machines
Olive and khaki static makes “leaves” and “branches”
Diapers are expensive, as are strollers and formula
Private in public means dermis on the train
Do people who say “home away from home” have homes to go to?
There is no formula for having children
Sexual dreams about machines pixilate the day
Stand in the aisle to save time
Worry less if the military formula looked more fit and less fake
Pixilated people usually carry deadly machines
Trains are not made for worry or for leaves or for branches
The song plays even though people live here"
People live in stations like they never had mothers or fathers
National Guardsmen in chubby camouflage pixels
Fit moms with legs like parentheses worry restroom machines
Olive and khaki static makes “leaves” and “branches”
Diapers are expensive, as are strollers and formula
Private in public means dermis on the train
Do people who say “home away from home” have homes to go to?
There is no formula for having children
Sexual dreams about machines pixilate the day
Stand in the aisle to save time
Worry less if the military formula looked more fit and less fake
Pixilated people usually carry deadly machines
Trains are not made for worry or for leaves or for branches
The song plays even though people live here"
May 6, 2025
Great. Another favorite poetry book. Stockholm and the Bay Area. Read out loud...
June 12, 2018
A curious exploration of languages and culture in a remarkably lucid yet abstract style. Jennifer melds storytelling in verse with her unique, intentionally turbulent wordplay to reconfigure your perspective on the intricacies of today's cross-cultural world. a very interesting experience
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews