Human Resources - Poems

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources isa sobering and perceptive portrait of technology’s impact on connection and power.

Human Resources follows a woman working in the male-dominated world of AI, designing women that don’t exist. In discerning verse, she workshops the facial characteristics of a floating head named “Nia,” who her boss calls “his type”; she loses hours researching “June,” an oddly sexualized artificially intelligent oven; and she spends a whole day “trying to break” a female self-improvement bot.The speaker of Stevenson’s poems grapples with uneasiness and isolation, even as she endeavors to solve for these problems in her daily work. She attempts to