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

AUTHOR
Philip Armstrong lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch and teaches literature, writing and human-animal studies at the University of Canterbury. His essay ‘On Tenuous Ground’ won the 2011 Landfall Essay Prize, and his first poetry collection Sinking Lessons (Otago University Press 2020) was the winner of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award