On the Care and Feeding of Robots

These are the poems of a Christian pilgrim, a mercurial, twenty-first century believer-priest who characterizes himself, from the outset, as a highly problematic nomad. Poem after poem suggests that, in our postmodern era, one's identity, if ungrounded in the eternal Word, may yield at best either a vanishing semblance of macroscopic reality or its probabilistic trace. That, of course, is the predicament confronted by any compulsive wanderer--a crisis as perceptual in its implications as it is spiritual. Yet the lyrics in On the Care and Feeding of Robots never seek to celebrate a static reality. In other words, here, it is far more than the romantic desire for permanence that agitates the speaker; rather, it is fear of the imminent loss of his spacewalker's dream life that unsettles him. To live as a shuttle astronaut in a universe without access to its numinous meanings is to exist as no more than a ghostly qwiff--a wave ripple in a virtual world.