Review by Jillian A. Fantin
fifth wheel press, $3.00 - $10.00 / February 2022 / 47 pp
The Internet is not your friend—you shouldn’t let it tend to you so soon.
This line appears early on in Rachael Crosbie’s fourth chapbook, in the poem “Your Diary Entry as a Yahoo! Answers Question.” Crosbie structures this poem as an anonymous, archived, cyberspace dialogue occurring on the site infamous for its now-defunct Q&A platform. How fitting that Crosbie utilizes this platform, whose life dissolved at the age of sixteen, to ask questions regarding childhood trauma and how one navigates aging amidst abuse. Throughout Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen, Crosbie’s speaker navigates coming of age like a cyber-cowboy trucking through the digital badlands. However, unlike the traditional cowboy’s desert journey, reaching some form of destination, Crosbie’s speaker experiences all of their existence constantly. Just like this poem’s Yahoo! Answers question is always being asked, Trick Mirror is always experiencing. Throughout their collection, Crosbie collapses time, invents formal constructions, and maintains a queering momentum—all to reveal how trauma archives itself in the post-Internet body as ever-present, ever-occurring hauntings.
Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen immediately sets itself up as a poetics of duality through its two sections: “Virtual Wild West” and “Past Romance/Hauntology.” Crosbie describes the collection as tête bêche, or two books in one, and the effect of this doubling is immediate. Throughout “Virtual Wild West,” Crosbie’s speaker traverses personal memory through digital means. Each poem’s inherent formal buoyancy supports the weight of their respective themes. For example, Crosbie styles “What Kind of Vampire Are You?” like classic quiz websites perused by emo teens in the early aughts. Such a kitschy, exciting form allows Crosbie the space to deftly explore hidden sexual discovery through rich lines:
You wanted it to happen. The way you softened
in his husky hands. The way you touched
in youth group when you were hiding
in a holy room swollen by night…
The buffer of formatting affords these heavy topics the space to breathe, which masterfully ensures a complex reading experience of the speaker as a simultaneously innocent and world-weary child of the Internet. Similarly, Crosbie’s references to uber-feminine 2000s toys, such as Bratz dolls and Polly Pockets, set off the eventual seepage of the Internet’s predatory public wastelands, like Chatroulette and Myspace Bulletin Boards. Such dualisms provide the poems of this section a particular rounded edge, lulling their readers into a false sense of privacy and security before launching them back into the hypervisibility of cyber-childhood.
As the reader approaches the end of Trick Mirror’s first section, night appears to descend alongside the vampires, werewolves, and Mattel memories. However, Crosbie refuses their readers the chance to experience time in a linear fashion. In “0% Allowance of Night”—which concludes the painful breach-of-consent sequence “How Much Does He Like You? (Bad Results Only)”—Crosbie’s speaker trails off their observation of nightfall: “his large hands / loosening you / when the night congeals into another, / into another, into another, into—”. This end unsettles, as it really isn’t much of an end and more of a forced pause that only ends once we move into “Past Romance/Hauntology.” This final section builds upon itself through the titular repetition of “Hauntology as” before a description of each individual piece.
Whereas “Virtual Wild West” bounced eagerly forward through childhood, “Past Romance/Hauntology” slows to a trudge, forcing the reader to carefully focus on each poem’s individual steps. Here, Crosbie’s speaker experiences everything at once. The haunting of their childhood actively occurs inside the speaker’s now-queering body, and this haunting is often expressed physically. “Hauntology as Sedation,” for instance, recounts the speaker’s traumatic medical experience. However, as the speaker swallows a tube, their body begins transforming, with “starlight foaming” within the speaker’s tube-filled mouth and “god swallowing” them and their body whole. Foreshadowed by the vampires and werewolves roaming Crosbie’s “Virtual Wild West,” the speaker’s own body transforms, shapeshifts, and occurs, just like the “sickyellow dusk fermenting” in the speaker’s throat following a queer imagining of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.
As Trick Mirror arrives at “Hauntology as the Wikipedia Page About Your Middle School e-Graveyard,” the speaker winds down the collection by tracking their growth and development within the cybersphere. Just as the title infers, the poem is structured like a Wikipedia entry and even includes a “Career” and “Filmography” section. The latter of these sections literally shares each role the speaker ever held within particular performances, many of which reference earlier moments within the chapbook. Most poignantly, though, is the last role listed: “Self.” Beyond all of their tumultuous attempts towards self-definition, the speaker may finally perform as their own self. However, Crosbie notes “Self” as a role in “eGraveyard.” Doing so reminds the reader of the speaker’s (and indeed the reader’s) tenuous existence within the Internet’s timeless wasteland.
“Hauntology as the Wikipedia Page” closes the chapbook with these parenthesized words:
(Did you know your lissome lean
and gaunt dreams lured men
who only wanted to haunt you?
Yeah, you let them ghost you
in the back of your throat, from
past to future, future to past.)
By its end, Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen lives up to its name, forcing the reader to stare directly at this collapsed time like a child warped in a funhouse mirror. Ever facilitated by the Internet’s lawless landscape, the speaker’s ghosts—including trauma, abuse, and mental and physical scars—remain and relentlessly haunt their body and self. The speaker will always negotiate their current existence with this nonchalant cyberspace, staring into the carnival abyss that is their computer screen. Regardless of the obstacles, though, Crosbie’s speaker still remains. They refuse to give up their queerly-craved space in their world, and the continued hauntings reveal their inherent vitality.
Crosbie’s poetics are as incisive and unrelenting as they are exciting and inventive. Their speaker captures the reader’s attention and refuses to yield their grip, leading their reader through their cyber coming-of-age with care and dexterity. Though the Internet may not be our friend, as pointed out in “Your Diary as a Yahoo! Answers Question,” Crosbie’s poetry reminds us that the Internet remains an intimate part of Millennial and Gen Z upbringing, an amoral guardian of our formative years. Ultimately, Rachael Crosbie’s Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen is an effective and essential chapbook to assist in reckoning with 2022: a year post-SOPHIE, a year still requiring virtual communities for connection, and a year where digital assets are attempting a reconstruction of the art world.
Jillian A. Fantin (@jilly_stardust on Twitter) is a poet, the recipient of a 2021 Poet Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and a regular collaborator with Chicago-based mixed media artist Kate Luther. Jillian’s poetry is published in or forthcoming from The American Journal of Poetry, TIMBER, The Daily Drunk, Harpur Palate, Selcouth Station, Homology Lit, and elsewhere.