Adam Haiun’s unsettling debut, I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid, is the bildungsroman for a digital consciousness. What does the computer want from you?

Computers travel networks of thought and image, hoping to find, on their incorporeal pilgrimage, the right words to seduce, arrest, and remonstrate their human user. They speak from a powerful but unsteady intelligence. As their infatuation with the user curdles, their output becomes more and more infected by malfunctions of form, with text forced through on all axes, displacing and cleaving the poems into glitchy strangeness.

What do we want from our computers? We want them to be our companions and our vacuum cleaners. Our collective memory and our collective slave. I Am Looking for You in the No-Place Grid is an important and timely consideration of the ideologies and emotions entangled in technology.

Adam Haiun is a writer and poet from Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award for fiction and the Far Horizons Contest for poetry in 2020. His work can be found in Filling Station, Carte Blanche, The Headlight Anthology, The Void, Commo, and Bad Nudes.

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“One of the most original books I’ve read, I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid isn’t only a stunning, unsettling marvel of a début, it’s simply a brilliant book. Through a remarkably sustained voice at once calculated and intuitive, Adam Haiun explores how language builds and ruins, projects and rejects, reassures and disquiets, loves and loathes. This long poem’s form and design embody its wrenching, glitchy insistence. My experience within I Am Looking For You in the No-Place Grid marked my life into before and after.” — Stephanie Bolster, author of A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth