Joan Retallack's "The Woman In The Chinese Room... A Prospective" takes John Searle's thought experiment on the possibility of artificial intelligence as its base: "how do you know the person locked for all those years in the Chinese room is a woman there are few if any signs if she exists at all she is the content of a thought experiment begun in a man's mind this is nothing knew & perhaps more complicated." Two of Amy Sparks' Tarot poems follow, intertwining voices in a nonstop rush as if determined to kick through the door of that Chinese room: clairvoyance, memory, confession and scraps of poisonous advice tangle with one another, not paratactically; there's an emotional field here being defined by these vibratory phrases. John M. Bennett, "in's charred shirt's blinking before the steps where's lacerations... where's scarification" pairs interestingly with Peter Ganick's "iceman to an impartial fluid whose nominal surface is ridden of willful portage"--referents become shifters in the mouth that enunciates, letters that form them; signals from the other side of the Chinese door? Susan M. Schultz' thoughtful poems ask questions and seem to expect they will be answered.--Charlotte Pressler
This review originally appeared in TapRoot Reviews #5,
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