Over time, various art projects have sprung out of new technologies, and this new effort from poets Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler must have been enormously fun to generate.

In much the same vein as their 2006 collaboration, apostrophe (ECW Press), update arises out of a computer-oriented conceit. Each poem in the book is composed of fictional Facebook status updates by some of history’s most famous poets, including T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Celan. The poems are characterized by playfulness and humour. Take, for example, the final trio of updates for the character “Jean Cocteau”: “Jean Cocteau still can’t get over the fact that Bertie Wooster is a sex symbol. Jean Cocteau thinks he wants vodka. Iced with a bit of lime. Jean Cocteau watched a battle tonight and, as has happened so often this season, Habs win, Habs win, Habs win.”

Composed during Facebook’s time at the pinnacle of social media, update taps into one aspect of the current zeitgeist in an intriguing and energetic way. It is a book of accumulations, which allows the poetry to emerge out of the way the various parts – both within individual pieces and throughout the collection as a whole – abut one another, the way apparently unconnected lines link up with each other and with the reader’s own external considerations. But more importantly, the pieces in this collection are enormously entertaining, and would undoubtedly be great fun to hear performed, as well.