Goblins

A young employee of GCHQ sweeps the internet for your secrets. Disappointed, they turn to poetry. Disappeared, their poems somehow end up in the lap of Steven J. Fowler, then into the hands of a journalist, then into the gloves of a less vulnerable benefactor, to reach your eyes, here and now, in this book, to be almost ignored, as most things are. Goblins is as much a poetry collection as a sardonic belly tickle for the rank underside of our online reality. Four long weird poems, each named after a particularly rampant surveillance program, considers the paradoxes of life lived in the age of the internet, when the line between public and private disintegrates and inexorable harvesting of our digital lives is a given. Sinister and playful, ambiguous and precise, these poems ponder the consequences for the watchers and the watched.