Machines Like Us

By: Joshua R. Helms

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Synopsis: Machines Like Us is part love story, part dreamscape, part exploration of self. This surreal and disjointed novella-in-verse follows its characters (the speaker, Boy, and Historian) as their acts of love and violence become indistinguishable. For these characters, love is dangerous, disorienting, self-erasing, traumatizing. Identities blur. Memories muddle. Bodies change. It becomes difficult for them to understand themselves as individuals without first investigating the boundaries separating each from theother: "there is no way to tell us / apart there is no way to know / whose hand is at the camera” Throughout the book, the speaker, Boy, and Historian struggle to connect and disconnect, to tether and un-tether, to survive, to make sense and meaning in and out of their relationships with each other. They are terrified to be both with and without each other, and the resulting horror -- the blood, the broken bodies, the decay, the changing faces -- becomes a landscape the characters can’t shake.