Conversations with a Machine by Ruth Irwin #books Or perhaps not: there is

Or perhaps not: there is nothing so certain or pat in Giles Goodland's poems of insect life

and the long-lasting effects of early messages about relationships and self-worth

“Kayla makes it impossible for you not to laugh

The two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected

and urgent as a dog’s moonlit howl

Conversations with a Machine by Ruth Irwin #books Or perhaps not: there isHow can I know if you are now alive? I echo thought, but cannot feel the beat. Debates around artificial intelligence continue to rage, with large language models considered at best an irritant, or, increasingly, an existential enemy to the written word. Looking past the anger, these Conversations with a Machine put the tech to creative use: here human and machine genuinely collaborate in writing a Shakespearean sonnet sequence, exploring urgent