“I am astonished by Lillian Yvonne Bertram’s trailblazing poetry in Travesty Generator. Bertram uses open-source coding to generate haunting inquiring elegies to Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner, and Emmett Till. By framing her “counter-narratives” of black lives in code and social media optimization, Bertram brilliantly conveys how black experience becomes codified, homogenized, and branded for capitalist dissemination. Code, written by white men, is part of the hardwired system of white supremacy, where structural violence begets itself. But Bertram hacks into it. She re-engineers language by synthesizing the lyric and coding script, taking the baton from Harryette Mullen and the Oulipians and dashing with it to late 21st century black futurity. Travesty Generatoris genius.”

- Cathy Park Hong
author of Engine Empire, and Dance Dance Revolution

Publication Date Dec. 1, 2019
$15 Paperback
ISBN 978-1-934819-84-5
Shop: Noemi Press