Bordered on all sides by constraint, Floor Games takes H.G. Wells's flair for the analogue and material, and then splices, parallel processing each dense iteration so that the language and twisting narratives and phrases emerge multitextual and multivocal, as collaborative multispecies.
Few poets use form to tease out and twist up their subject matter as inventively as Verboom, who here juxtaposes texts that are logically (or at least goofily) connected and yet universes apart. The poems that result are as slick as they are jarringly incongruent; that the whole thing comes out sounding like Verboom speaks to the idiosyncrasy of his voice.
Floor Games is a wonderful, rich piece of work. In the expected manner of procedurally-generated poetry, it skates along in the strange space a little way before language breaks down - and finds many thought-provoking and beautiful things there. Its unlikely seed texts enable it to venture into dark and complex themes (militarism, colonialism, vivisection, AI) and yet it remains the same changeable, startling, childlike guide throughout.
Excerpt: "I. The Toys to Have"
First off, I hear, a box of blue flame.
press close to the beasts in the box.
Much like a heap of rain.
—just a slight atmospheric disillusionment.
like somebody else's dead game.
of the heavens, for an afterlife.
One moment, ladies and gentlemen.
their plans against us in a mess.
sing closed will be the latest bullet.
mouths tannic with red, is the norm.
to have beef, a tune that levels cattle.
upon our floor. How utterly we playroom.
are a flash in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
astronomical divisions serve as bridges.
look broadly in a blue search.