Not A Book Review: my poetry chapbook is out tomorrow!

Posted on by fiendfullyreading
COVER Syntax Error Siobhan Dunlop Title and author's name appear on black rectangles in commodore 64 text input format set against a field of white text on blue that spells out a repeat of the "Hello World" programme code

As the title says, this isn’t a book review, because it’s about my book! My debut poetry chapbook, Syntax Error, is out tomorrow from kith books. If you’re a fan of poetry, computer code, or living on the internet, you might enjoy it (and check out kith’s other books too)!

It is the result of a number of years of writing poetry relating to digital things, based on both my job teaching digital skills and various interests in digital things. There’s some definite inspiration from books like Several People Are Typing (especially the way that book plays around with the self in relation to chat app Slack) and also a lot of poetry I’ve read recently and tweets I’ve seen. It also pairs very nicely with the VERY ONLINE zine, which a couple of the poems in it were first published in.

Don’t forget, you can always check out my published poetry on the my poetry page – there’s lots of stuff there you can read online for free as well.

To finish up, here’s a little sneak preview of one of the poems:

Syntax Error I tell people: you've got to be very clear because computers don't understand anything except on/off ones and zeroes binary; I tell people: syntax is so important you've got to be careful with your indentation if you don't want Python to get confused; I tell people: watch what you call things the computer doesn't know what to do with non-matching names mistaken identity; I tell people: you don't have to remember to put the semi-colon at the end Javascript can handle it but would prefer otherwise; I tell people: think like a machine to get logic right but don't forget that you can be flexible don't forget you are not the computer;