Data Mind: Poems by Joanna Fuhrman Review by Christine E. Hamm

Data Mind: Poems by Joanna Fuhrman

Review by Christine E. Hamm

Publisher: Curbstone Books

Publication Date: October 2024

ISBN:  0810147742

Pages: 96

When speaking of a virus, we tend to think of it in negative terms: a computer virus injects “malicious” code, a physical virus “steals” our cells and converts them to another purpose.  Only lately has “going viral” become a positive thing. As we see with this analogy, our computers have become synonymous with our bodies.  And thus, as our computers, phones, watches, etc., have become enmeshed with the internet, the internet has, in some ways, become an extension of our brains and nervous systems.   Technology and new ways of communicating have infected us. But what makes our minds and the web connect?  Is it the colors, the sounds, the faces?   The constantly moving and morphing images?  In its most basic form, the internet connects to us because we are addicted to language.  Since I did my dissertation on animal/human psychology, language, and culture, I believe humans are the only animal that uses language (as a form of repeatable and manipulated symbols) to construct and imagine reality.  

Johanna Fuhrman’s Data Mind connects these changes in our environment and the drift in our languages to our physical body as well as our psychic space. This book is one of the few that not only faces, but incorporates, what is “brand new” in our culture and how it has changed language and the way we process information. Data Mind is a representation of how our perceptions of language and meaning have shifted from the page to the screen, and how that screen has morphed into multiple psychedelic worlds.

Several poems in Data Mind are titled, “Data Mind”. Repetition of a word or phrase in different situations tends to blur the meaning.  Data Mind, the book, is about such blurring.  Meaning, interpretation, and medium are always front and center in this text –  messages are transmitted, then examined, flipped, dissected, and stitched back together. Most of the “Data Mind” poems are explicitly political, but in innovative, surreal ways.

For example, one of the poems titled, “Data Mind”, (pg 78) starts like this: “The joke that replaced our democracy kept waiting for the laugh track to return.  I tried to recalibrate my response, tried to say, “No, thank you” without turning off the lights.” She recalls old technology, “The radio swallowed the television,” and then tries to treat herself like technology – tries to “recalibrate” but fails. Instead, she is like the recording angel, noting how “The joke that replaced our democracy kept waiting for the laugh track to return.”  

“Laugh track” evokes the world of TV, but not the awkward television of the fifties, but the sophisticated, manipulative TV of later years, where a canned laugh track was used to convince the audience that something was funny.  In this case, the laugh track can be linked to social media, most poignantly, Facebook and Twitter, which were invaded by Russian interlopers intending to sway public opinion and radicalize Americans during the 2016 election.  The archaic laugh track along with the “joke” that became our country depended on simply the appearance of believability – not the actual truth.  Manipulation and misdirection now mock most facets of democracy, so much so that people refuse to believe the popular vote.  The body politic is sick, and the infection, like a computer virus, aims simply to replicate its own toxic message.

Of all these texts that splice and recreate, my favorite of the collection is “My American Name is Money”. This poem starts by mentioning “terror” which, if you are an American (as it states in the title), brings to mind terrorism, as in the twin towers, and “the war on terror”, as in bombing women, children and noncombatants.  But the poet immediately flips from those heavy associations to an amusing “mishearing”: “Who is this ‘her’” the poet asks.  And then she dives deep again – “This is the problem with coalition building”.    An interesting thing about this line is that it is so unpoetic.  It would feel right at home in a sociology paper.  

This piece, like all of Fuhrman’s poems, balances on a knife’s edge and keeps falling off.  On the one hand, there’s serious emotions and statements about our country.  On the other, there’s playful explorations of language, selfhood, and epistemology.  And therefore, in this poem, there’s a poetic and unreal line right after “building” – “You think you are holding hands with another, but it’s actually an empty rubber glove”.   This is a line that asks for a leap of imagination.  It only makes sense if you read it sideways. It repeats the idea that flesh has been substituted by something that only loosely resembles it.   And then the poem proceeds from the empty glove to De Chirico – who painted plenty of empty gloves, and in the painting, “The Song of Love”, the glove is next to a grey stone face.  

As a side note, her treatment of “glove” echoes her treatment of memes in the book.  In these pages, memes are created, presented, and referenced, but the meaning is multiplied and elided.  It is as if she is saying, here, look at this: but it’s actually this, no, THIS. Moreover, some of these poems share words presented in the photos/memes. In the meme with a photo of a woman with cake sprinkles all over her tongue and lips, a statement is made, “It’s still a language even if no one understands it. “  However, in the title of a poem, that statement is contradicted, “It’s not a language if no one understands it.”  This weaving of repetition and distortion throughout the book adds a feeling of continuity and eternity: there is no ending, no beginning.  Nothing is ever finished or complete.

​To return to another line in “My American Name is Money,” soon after the De Chirico glove reference, the absurdity appears again: “In the algorithmic state, the town square is a cage where we think we are having sex until we wake up and find we are thumb wrestling a robot ghost.” This line, as strangeas it sounds, makes sense.  “The algorithmic state” is what our government and world has become – the algorithm is both political and visceral.  It connects to both the state of being (such as being “cold”) and “a democratic state.”   The algorithmic state has become our “town square” where, in the past, people socialized and politicized each other.  And now it is a cage – there is no going outside it.  For most in America, to be cut off from technology and the internet is to be isolated almost completely. 

In the text as a whole, Joanna stitches a link between consciousness, as it is situated in the body, and the electronic mind, as it morphs, kicks, flees, and attacks.  With another example, in her poem “The Early Adopter”, the world of the internet, social media, cell phones, etc. has seeped into the very body of a nameless girl: “In an empty chatroom in 1993, she found a stranger’s glow-in-the-dark brain and saw her own brain plummeting from above… She gave up cigarettes, novels, needlework, doodling…”  Fuhrmann explores how the very nature of the brain is transformed by the post-electronic age – how her brain and the brains of others become something new, ridiculous, and glowing.  Although neither an endorsement nor condemnation of how consciousness has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries, the poem ends with a series of surreal “why nots?” which imply that meaning has been loosened from its origin.

Finally, Data Mind highlights the changes language and the self have made in our post-internet world.  But it also explores how this new landscape has infected the body politic with a virus that is not entirely benign.  With their frequent mention of “country”, “democracy”, and “money”, these poems engage with the political and social implications of these new ways of being and knowing.  In this way, she connects our surreal and idiosyncratic use of technology to brave new worlds of understanding, but also, dangerous prisons of radicalism. 

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of six previous poetry collections, most recently To a New Era. Her poems have been featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Slowdown podcast, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is an assistant teaching professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and a coeditor of Hanging Loose Press.

Christine E. Hamm (she/her), queer & disabled English Professor, social worker and student of Ecopoetics, has a PhD in English, and lives in New Jersey.  She won the Tenth Gate prize from WordWorks for her book of hybrid texts, Gorilla.  She has had work featured in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many others. She has published six chapbooks, and several books — hybrids as well as poetry.

5 March 2025