Join poet Jim Redmond at Deep Vellum Books for a reading and discussion of his collection Because You Previously Liked or Played, in conversation with Deep Vellum poetry editor Sebastián H. Páramo.
The poems in Because You Previously Liked or Played reveal an extremely online persona who finds life IRL challenging. In the reality of these poems, the reader confronts the difficulties and nuances of a world rendered more accessible, more instantaneous, but also more isolating, uncertain, even terrifying thanks to the internet. The speaker faces a social sphere that is bigger, faster, more politically unstable.
Lyricism and personal expression are interlaced with the language and syntax of chat rooms, gamers, e-commerce, in a way that troubles the dividing lines between the human and the inhuman, the authentic and the artificial, the real and the hyperreal. The self morphs into a sequence of failed firewalls and emotions. And yet, the speaker continues questing for answers, for meaning, for connection.
These poems provide an unflinching look at a wired existence, but they never lose their capacity for wonder, feeling, surprise.
Jim Redmond is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Because You Previously Liked or Played. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Redivider, and Diagram, among others. Born and raised in Michigan, he received his MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in creative writing, poetry from the University of North Texas. He serves as Director of Academic Support and Learning at Graceland University.
Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and elsewhere.
His work has received fellowships and support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, and CantoMundo. Sebastián received his MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Texas. He is the founding editor of The Boiler, Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.