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.