/face by William Lessard
SKU:
$16.00
$16.00
per item
What does poetry mean in the age of artificial intelligence and the fracking of selfhood? Enter /FACE (KERNPUNKT Press, April 2026), the debut collection from underground poet and digital theorist William Lessard, featuring poems collaged from Google Patents of facial capture technology. Called “a devastating critique of digital surveillance, facial recognition, and monetization of online user data and identity through advertising” by JACKET2, the book includes work that has appeared in American Poetry Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Southwest Review, Posit, and Action, Spectacle. At a time when basic human value is being questioned, /FACE is essential work that channels Warhol, Nancy Spero, and Don Mee Choi.
Praise
“Lessard’s work is as much a series of ecstatic, poetic lightning bolts as it is a no-holds-barred criticism of the tech world and our Matrix-esque future. Lessard has chosen not just to describe the nightmarish evolution of technology before us, but, like the Futurists 100 years ago, to proclaim its damnation." — Rain Taxi
"For nearly two decades, Lessard has been out to do what Bob Dylan did to folk in 1965 and Miles Davis did to jazz in 1969: breathe new life into an art form that has grown a little too predictable and static." — PopMatters
"Via a lyrical and grotesque collage of patent drawings, PowerPoint templates, tables, corporate jargon that feels less appropriated than leaned into, flash fiction, and Barthesian semiotics, /face proposes that first we first need to look in the mirror, then stop conflating looking inward with knowledge of ourselves." — Electric Literature
"Like Robert Rauschenberg digging up junk for his next project, Lessard recycles extracted digital detritus into compelling lyric artifacts." — Arts Fuse
"Writing is a habit, not a practice. I’m not a fucking chiropractor. It’s a nasty, filthy habit, like any addiction or weird compulsion like checking the stove twenty times before leaving the house." — Interview in rob mclennan's blog
"What happens when poetic forms and technology collide? In /face, William Lessard uses patents for facial surveillance devices to create something new and haunting."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Lessard’s is a poetics of refusal, of ungovernability, of unrepresentability.” — JACKET2
"For nearly two decades, Lessard has been out to do what Bob Dylan did to folk in 1965 and Miles Davis did to jazz in 1969: breathe new life into an art form that has grown a little too predictable and static." — PopMatters
"Via a lyrical and grotesque collage of patent drawings, PowerPoint templates, tables, corporate jargon that feels less appropriated than leaned into, flash fiction, and Barthesian semiotics, /face proposes that first we first need to look in the mirror, then stop conflating looking inward with knowledge of ourselves." — Electric Literature
"Like Robert Rauschenberg digging up junk for his next project, Lessard recycles extracted digital detritus into compelling lyric artifacts." — Arts Fuse
"Writing is a habit, not a practice. I’m not a fucking chiropractor. It’s a nasty, filthy habit, like any addiction or weird compulsion like checking the stove twenty times before leaving the house." — Interview in rob mclennan's blog
"What happens when poetic forms and technology collide? In /face, William Lessard uses patents for facial surveillance devices to create something new and haunting."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“Lessard’s is a poetics of refusal, of ungovernability, of unrepresentability.” — JACKET2
Poets House Reading & Launch
with Charles Bernstein, Susan Lewis, Joseph Milazzo, Jerome Sala, and Sandra Simonds
Special intro by Michael Londra
with Charles Bernstein, Susan Lewis, Joseph Milazzo, Jerome Sala, and Sandra Simonds
Special intro by Michael Londra