Human Resources: Poems

Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry

Prize, Ryann Stevenson’s Human Resources is a 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

harness control by eating clean, doing yoga, and searching for age-defying skin

care, though she dreams “about the department / that women get reassigned to

after they file / harassment complaints.” With sharp, lyrical intelligence, she

imagines alternative realities where women exist not for the whims of men but

for their own—where they become literal skyscrapers, towering over a world that

never appreciated them.

Chilling and lucid, Human

Resources challenges the minds programming our present and future to consider

what serves the collective good. Something perhaps more thoughtful and human,

Stevenson writes: “I want to say better.”