Touch Screen
The word ‘touchscreen’ entered the English language in the early 1970s to describe a computer display screen that also functions as an input device operated by touching its surface. In this absorbing collection, Touch Screen, poet Philip Armstrong dismantles this now ubiquitous term and helps us see its component parts afresh – ‘touch’ and ‘screen’ strangely reconfigured in today’s complex technological world.
In poems that range from the personal lyric to retellings of myths and stories long held in the human imagination, Armstrong explores the rapidly evolving interface between human and non-human worlds. Touch Screen brings us face to face with being alive here and now, and asks the urgent question: Can you feel it?
Mid-day mid-week mid-scroll and touch
screened far too long, I’m struck so flat
I’m lying face-up on the carpet
when something reveals itself: above me
showing only when my eyes drift
hangs a single thread of spider silk.
From ‘Jacob’s Ladder’
‘Armstrong’s nimble voice is both hilarious and profound.’
—Anne Kennedy
Reviews and Interviews
'It seems there is nothing beyond reach in Armstrong’s embrace of subject matter. He will use science, or mythology, or gossip, or the bland-seeming but sharply noticed features of the landscape through which his daily movements take him, with ease. His agility, his acuity, deny any difficulty in producing poetry to cover any topic with conviction and insight. What helps tremendously is the breadth of Armstrong’s vocabulary, the facility with which he makes something strange by the accurate insertion of little-used words. Taking terms from niche subject usage and putting them into plain sentences, can create strange worlds within worlds. A sense of the unexpected or of surprise pervades more than a few of these poems. We are offered an energetic language of possibility, used with broad terms of reference, and a ready wit. An awareness of human frailty in the face of what the planet knows, is at the heart of Touch Screen. Armstrong’s blend of humility and laughter weaves a cogent, almost spiritual, spell; his entranced language renders a remarkable sense of the sheer weirdness of life on earth.'
Pat White for Landfall Tauraka Review Read
About the author
Philip Armstrong
Philip Armstrong lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch and teaches literature, writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury. His essay ‘On Tenuous Grounds’ won the 2011 Landfall Essay Prize, and his first poetry collection Sinking Lessons (Otago University Press, 2020) was the winner...
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Sinking Lessons