Fidget is writer Kenneth Goldsmith's transcription of every movement made by his body during 13 hours on Bloomsday (June 16) 1997. It is a hypnotic work, strangely compelling and disorienting at the same time; you'll never think about your body in the same way again. Originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art as a collaboration with vocalist Theo Bleckmann, Fidget attempts to reduce the body to a catalogue of mechanical movements by a strict act of observation. The stress of this rigorous exercise creates a condition of shifting reference points and multiple levels of observation that inevitably undermines the author's objective approach, and the trajectory of the work begins to change. The text of Fidget is followed by an afterword written by Marjorie Perloff, which both explains the circumstances of the project's creation (including the important role Jack Daniel's plays in the latter part of the text) and explores its results.

In her long-anticipated fourth collection, The Engineers , Katy Lederer draws on the newfangled languages of reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and global warming to ask the age-old questions: What is "the self"? What is "the other"? And how to reproduce "one's self"? In poems that are both lyrical and playfully autobiographical, Lederer imagines form as a kind of genetics, synthesizing lines out of a rigorous constraint. Things can go wrong. The body--or poem--malfunctions, evacuating crucial parts of itself (miscarriage), or growing too aggressively or quickly (cancer). The body--or poem--attacks or even eats itself (autoimmune dysfunction; autophagy). Written almost entirely in the choral "we," the poems move among the perspectives of the bewildered parent, the unborn child, and the inscrutable God who looks down upon the human world. In a post-Roe landscape, the poems complicate and ultimately refashion our pre-conceived notions of the self--and of life. Radical, uncanny, and stunningly original, The Engineers takes us on a journey to a place we've never been, but that is hauntingly familiar.