hi everyone! it feels like we just saw each other! i’m writing again with an exciting update about my full-length collection of visual poetry, random access memory: it’s now available for preorder thru Bullshit Lit’s webstore! i’m also hoping to write up one of these posts for each of my books to give you a little peek into them before you buy. some of this stuff lives on my website, but i’ll also talk a bit more about process on here and give you a look behind the scenes.
so basically: this collection came to be after i made an erasure poem from a page of a Gossip Girl novel and started thinking about my early writing and photography, as well as its influences. that turned into a total deep dive into my old hard drive, which i used to back up my computer from 2011-2015ish. i go into this more in an interview i recently did that will be out in July, but the anatomy of each page is multi-layered—the base is a collage made from images from the hard drive, and the overlay is a poem written in one of several ways. the poetry is comprised of rewrites of my high school poetry, erasures from novels i read growing up, and centos sourced from searching my twitter, email, and hard drive for specific keywords. the result? 80 pages of totally genre-fucked exploration of traumatic memory loss, in full color. i’m really excited about this one, y’all.
press
praise
In ‘random access memory’, nat raum sheds finesse for total authenticity—and fashions a satisfyingly challenging work of art in the process. This book is more than just a journey paved with poetry, pops of color, and immaculate design elements. It’s an accomplishment, a courageous albeit devastating feat by which the reader is stunned in an ice bath of code, toner, and honest sentiment. The reader is made to question what is artificial versus what is real, and even reckon with the likelihood that there is no real distinction between the two when it comes to the sentient mind.
In these pages, raum gives us work that is human and simultaneously sublime, sublime and simultaneously computerized, and in doing so, leaves us wishing random access memory might double as an unauthorized data chip we can inject into ourselves and let live beneath our skin—glitch after glitch, and over a wonderfully uncomfortable, but deeply necessary, period of time.—Ami J. Sanghvi, Co-Founder of Gutslut Press, and Author of Into Oblivion, x( )-id</3, In Residuum, and more
The experience of reading nat raum’s ‘random access memory’ is a little like walking into a nightclub well past sensible o’clock with the strobe flickering, shadows looming in corners - one of whom looks like your ex-boyfriend and another that may well be that girl you once had a thing with – not knowing whether it’s nostalgia or desire that’s making you nauseous.
raum’s collection flickers on the page like a kaleidoscope of exposed negatives, using the RGB digital colour chart to filter their own randomly accessed memories. Exploring everything from evil twins, Facebook settings, Ace of Base, trauma and the relentless tiredness of living in the modern world, this work leaps off the page, yet retains the fuzziness and chaotic unreliability of memory.
“I exist as an npc in a rpg about a dystopian future” they write in "an exhaustive search (v. 1.0)". raum continually explores new boundaries with their work, and ‘RAM’ is no exception. It is an extraordinary and singular work, and I for one, want nothing more than to be immersed in this dystopian mind palace.
—JP Seabright, Editor at Full House Literary, Author of GenderFux and Machinations
selected works
you can find selected pieces from this book published in the following places:
“an exhaustive search (v. 1.0)” and “HGHFCKR” in FATHERFATHER Magazine, Issue 2: Poetic Realism
“favors (v. 1.0)” in Cutbow Quarterly, Issue 1
artwork from “an e-vitation,” “an exhaustive search (v. 1.5),” “galileo,” “ignorable,” and “mixed media” in the winnow magazine’s Digital Wastelands Issue
“favors (v. 3.0)” in Vocivia Magazine, Issue 3: Cyberscript
“bittersweet (recovered)” and “WHYFCKR” in Scavengers 1.1
“sexually active” in my May newsletter
“an exhaustive search (v. 2.5)” in my June newsletter
random access memory is now available for print preorder. a PDF version will be available from Bullshit Lit upon release in July.