Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen by tommy blake

tommy blake’s fourth chapbook, Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen is a deeply badass poetic manifesto of teenhood in a lawless virtual landscape. blake makes use of all the internetisms you knew and loved to MS-paint a vivid picture of queer coming-of-age experience through the e-graveyard of MySpace that’s been resurfacing from the soil as hyperpop and trauma.

“Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen is a true inter-face. Bounding between the neon-hued, mall-bound signifiers of zillennial youth and the bruised, “sickyellow dusk[s]” underneath, this text gnashes at the agonywork of adolescence. Charging toward a comprehensive “tauntology” of childhood trauma, blake seizes their Lip Smackers, builds a house, and promptly sets fire to the sicksweet kindling.” —[sarah] Cavar, author of OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (Ethel Press, 2022)

“tommy blake’s Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen is not just a love letter to what virtual landscapes we’ve become infatuated with, but a beautiful undertaking of the schematics and text that surrounds them. Whether it’s “his place swallowed / by custard dusk / a sallowed basting / of sweet smoke & sweat” or “your skin slipping o bones / as gross angels press you out of body,” each poem challenges the ways in which we toy with visual poetics, unraveling a mountain of imagery and curiosities that stick with us. Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen is an undertaking I’m thankful exists; a book I’ll be returning to again and again, when I’m searching for something to send my gaze towards language once unreachable but now magnetically an arm’s length away.” —Matt Mitchell, author of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy (Big Luck Books, 2021)

“As its title suggests, tommy blake’s Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen returns us to our childhood obsessions with the internet and the fantasy realms that lived within it. Split into two distinct sections, this book gives us a glimpse of what it’s like to be on both sides of the mirror, living through trauma and then trying to survive it. blake fills these pages with MySpace references, online quizzes, and structural experimentations that mimic these virtual spaces, and as a result, we simultaneously experience feelings of nostalgia and terror. As we resettle into those familiar places, we also recognize how not everything online was truly as it seemed. Here, blake reminds us that the internet is a graveyard, where pages and pages of our past selves and traumas can always come back to haunt us.” —Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm (Variant Literature, 2021)

“Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen not only serves up some much-needed. scene-kid, y2k nostalgia on a platter of old-school Hot Topic $20 emo band tees, but simultaneously leaves the angsty 2000s child in us all feeling deeply nourished in the face of our current, increasingly draining dystopian realities. As a more recent fan of blake’s work and a proud co-founder of the resident ‘MySpace disaster press,’ I found Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen to be the exact dose of queer, holographic 2000s nostalgia I didn’t realize I so desperately needed. These poems invoke everything from the horrors of 4th grade mean girls with their immaculate Bratz dolls to the magic of truly vintage Paramore. The vibe here is a world of deeply pixelated, early joy-revival Avril Lavigne H O T  P I N K <3 combined with the smooth, rubbery smell of a brand new Polly Pocket and the gentle thrill of glitching one’s way through The Sims Bustin’ Out on Nintendo Gamecube.  Moreover, blake’s poems function on several levels: as a series of love letters to another era, an intimate playlist for the lost, flailing 2000s child in us all, and even a bottle of lyrical medicine for the present-day young adult who was raised on a lethal diet of deception and infinite broken promises. In summation, Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen embodies the passionate, heartbreaking, millennial longing for a time so-long gone it feels nothing short of ethereal, and is set to be among the best poetry releases of 2022.” —Ami J. Sanghvi, co-founder of Gutslut Press and author of [in]transpiring (Swallow::Tale Press, 2021), Confessions of a Baby Vamp: Letters to John Milton (Gutslut Press, 2022), and Baby Wraith Burrito Bones (Really Serious Literature, 2022)