The words “four eyes” on the dedication page of Larissa Lai’s first full-length poetry collection telegraph her intentions. Comprising four long, complementary poems, Automaton Biographies reckons with matters of identity and questions what it is to be human in our current geopolitical and technological contexts.

At base, Lai argues, we’ve ignored our species’ social conscience in favour of material gain, be it in the form of more efficient food sources or more efficient bombs. In “nascent fashion,” humanity marries technology and murder in a fetishistic embrace: “we dream tomorrow’s murders / in dolby sound surround.” By contrast, animals such as the famous gorilla Koko (from the poem “ham”), who is “hamming for the camera,” seem more “human” all the time.

In “rachel,” Lai takes on the voice of a character from Blade Runner, a film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 sci-fi noir novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The plot revolves around a group of androids who have achieved self-consciousness and, in so doing, have blurred the line between human and machine. The language in this piece is inorganic, telegraphic: “my father’s enterprise / rations my emotional response time,” Rachel explains. Even the act of crying is mechanized: “my ducts / manufacture this dribble / i salt    i water.” While the poem may be of interest to fans of the movie, it ultimately proves little more than a précis of the film script.

Automaton Biographies is a mixture of pop-culture allusions and post-structuralist theory. Its fractured lyricism is often difficult to parse: “read body as registers switch / fox woman arms intellectual / green as heart grows aching for / conversation not admitted.” Like the technological innovations she addresses, Lai’s meditations on a post-human world proceed with an unsettling machine-like efficiency stripped of human vitality.