Join us for an evening with Tyler Gillespie, author of Florida Man: Poems (Red Flag Poetry), The Thing about Florida: Exploring a Misunderstood State (University Press of Florida), and his new book of poetry the nature machine! (Autofocus) launching May 9th. Tyler will be in conversation with Kenneth Kidd, UF Professor of English Lit on March 23rd at 7pm at the Civic Media Center, 433 S Main Street.

Book Description

Tyler Gillespie, like many of us, has recently spent a lot of time online and in other landscapes devoid of IRL humans. During quarantine with his grandmother in Florida, he began expanding his writing practice with new forms of media expression, going as far as recording snippets of a comedy album and creating a pop diva robot persona through text-to-talk technology. He eventually abandoned these projects, but traces of them can be found in the nature machine!

Throughout this collection, Gillespie merges poetic forms with interstitial moments of sound and visual technologies to playfully theorize the now and to seriously contemplate the future. With dexterity, he threads ideas on cybernetics, pop music, the environment, desire, and recovery to examine how technology has transformed our natures. But ultimately, full of warmth and wit, this book reminds us why, despite everything, we're still not-yet-machines.

"Tyler Gillespie is a smart and hilarious poet. His poems know what it's like to have fun, and are as entertaining when they're goofing around with Britney Spears as with Ferdinand de Saussure. Whether he's riffing on Sex and the City and/or discussing Karl Marx, the nature machine! will move you to laugh and to think--about the moon, about the Bible, about exclamation marks, about almost everything!” – Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows