*PDF EBOOK* Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Through code poems where glitches are refrains, we witness systems that have made patterns of their errors. When in the process do we process that such glitches need scare quotes? That some accidents are power in action? Lillian Yvonne-Bertram’s ominous Travesty Generator works the problem again and again, a cyberBlues of permutating loops both automated and desperate. So, when they (re)write, “The story does not compute,” I hear a robot and vulnerability, like AutoTune in 808s and Heartbreak. I also hear a brilliant Black shade in the machine, playing counter ‘rithm in the operating systems of racial and gender violence, poetic form, and the lyric voice.

Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies, Mess and Mess and, Patter, The Black Automaton, and all-around badass poet, librettist, and performer