Are Friends Electric?

Overview

Are Friends Electric? offers a vivid and moving vision of a past, present, and future mediated by technology. The first part is comprised largely of found poems which emerge from conversations about sex bots, people who feel an intimate love for bridges, a meditation on Theo Jansen's beautifully strange animal sculptures, and the lives of birds in cities. A series of speculative poems further explores questions of how we incorporate technology into our lives and bodies. In these poems on grief, Heath asks how technology can keep us close with those we have lost.

Author Biography

Helen Heath's first book, Graft, won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book for Poetry Award in 2013. It was also the first book of fiction or poetry to be shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington.