MissSettl

MissSettl, Kamden Ishmael Hilliard’s delightfully jarring debut collection, explodes assumptions about language, race, and American (post)colonialism in an age of information overload. Hilliard deploys a fragmented, chatty vernacular, with SMS shorthand, idiosyncratic portmanteaus, and an array of playful typography, including unusual spacing and bracketed asides. A highly stylized voice often finds itself questioning systems of formal education (“ You autodidact of the anthropocene !”) and interrogating “racialized collegiality”:

Enlitened wytdudes couldn’t never be content 
2 luk @the sky [ jus luk ] or lack an explainatron . 

i can’t read myself from public niggardly precog-
-nition , tho I do kno epistolmythology is a

branch of philosophy dead
icated 2 the study of knoledge . Humans make shit ,

fine ,
but couldn’t we make sumthin’ cooler ? 

Hilliard jumps across topics in a stream of consciousness that makes reading the book feel like scrolling through algorithmically generated hyperlinks. It’s what I imagine poetry that lives in the blockchain to sound like. In one poem, the speaker calls out a professor for their ableist language:

[…] in fact , the schizophrenic
is at greater risk of violence from others than the [ ew
] average folx ; & in fact , there’s no schizophrenia but
a spectrum . it’s dumbasses lyk statsprof [ ytqueer , summa the
worst , i tell ya / complete w a flat-footed Midwest crack-cent
] hu think medical conditions r adjectives 4 shitty tech .

Long asides, paradoxically central to the lyrical characterization of the speaker, subvert any hierarchy of importance while pushing up against the boundaries of legibility. A 21st century Dadaist or Metamodernist text, this collection demands that readers rethink the present state (and future!) of American poetics.