YES I AM HUMAN I KNOW YOU WERE WONDERING - Erin Dorney
ABOUT THE BOOK
Like millions of others, Erin Dorney discovered Adriene Mishler's "Yoga with Adriene" YouTube videos in 2020, while isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering collects epistolary prose poems written to—and in conversation with—the popular influencer, along with a series of image-text collages. Arranged in a thirty day cycle, these hybrid works test the boundaries of parasocial relationships during a time when many individuals were both highly online and reconnecting with the unmediated natural world. In her continued exploration of celebrity, Dorney brings lyrical playfulness and beauty to pervasive influencer culture, bodily hyperfixation, movement, calendars, and cycles.
PRAISE FOR YES I AM HUMAN…
"In Erin Dorney’s Yes I am Human I Know You Were Wondering, the distinction between the I and the You—already pretty flimsy in my experience—gets even murkier. Dorney orchestrates its eventual conflation through metaphysical prose poems and organically unsettling collages that foreground the power differential between an ever-widening range of relations: celebrity and fan, teacher and student, beloved and lover, pixels and flesh, writer and reader. She weaves Adriene’s wellness speak and broad directives through deftly described loneliness (‘We are the taxidermied trying to twist.’) and word music (‘Lies leaf-out late—clotted and dirty.’). Dorney writes, ‘An illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation’ and I nod, happy to be lost alongside her in the slipperiness of the real."
—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors
"I love Erin Dorney’s new collection of epistolary poems Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, so vivid, so tender, pained and human, moving through 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ videos with such evocative curiosity—epistolary as in I reach, I long for, as in I long towards, Adriene's voice floating in and out like a visiting angel. Dorney's poems, like her collages, are beautiful assemblages, made of the literal stuff of life. Somehow Dorney bends epistolary address towards elegy and utopia at once, a methodology for collective dreaming—a gift."
—Wendy Xu, author of Phrasis
“Erin Dorney’s brain is performance art reaching for new emotional levels in this collection of letters/poems and collage work. The loneliness of the pandemic is made tangible through soul, or rather source searching, yoga, and the need to reach out for human connection. Here we have an introspection that becomes full-bodied."
—Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident
"‘What’s being done is nothing. Imagine yourself as a baby. Now, imagine a whole country of that.’ Dorney’s prose poems—diaristic and epistolary, questing and questioning—chronicle a pandemic month of isolation and helplessness, rage and wonder. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering may be rooted in a parasocial relationship through Youtube, but Dorney offers us more than a time capsule or a one-way mirror—these poems reach out and touch, returning us again and again to the body (‘the soft coiled curve of each foot’), to the imagination (‘we are spongey, a new breed of grabbers’) and (‘How can there be so many different shades of green?’) to love."
—Annelyse Gelman, author of Vexations
“There's an infectious exuberance in Yes I Am Human, in these epistolary missives that are both breathless and halting as they catalog desire, yoga, absence, awful ordinary objects, and the awkward, tender practice of waiting, even if it's for both simply ‘a way to take back touch’ and an impossibly encyclopedic list of wants like ‘fewer people, less caring, engine data, propeller theory, an owl to fly out of a tree.’ Erin Dorney has made a book that captures what's both quietly nourishing and unsettlingly abstract about our most mediated forms of sociality, so that when we encounter ‘an Undefeated season of noise’ we think it could go on forever, even when we know the image will eventually go out like a light. The sharp, capacious moments captured in these poems glance against each other and accummulate into a noisy structure of feeling that reaches far beyond these pages."
—Julia Bloch, author of The Sacramento of Desire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Dorney is the author of I Am Not Famous Anymore: Poems After Shia LaBeouf (2018), Grating, Darling, Full of Dirt (2023), The Usual Arteries (2024), and many zines. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Tolka, Passages North, Juked, Bone Bouquet, and HAD, among other publications. Her literary artwork and installations have been featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Susquehanna Art Museum. She holds degrees in librarianship and creative writing, is the co-founder of Fear No Lit, and lives in the non-city part of New York. Find her online at erindorney.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub date: March 4, 2025
Print Length: 80 pages
Dimensions: 5×7”
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-957392-36-3
ABOUT THE BOOK
Like millions of others, Erin Dorney discovered Adriene Mishler's "Yoga with Adriene" YouTube videos in 2020, while isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering collects epistolary prose poems written to—and in conversation with—the popular influencer, along with a series of image-text collages. Arranged in a thirty day cycle, these hybrid works test the boundaries of parasocial relationships during a time when many individuals were both highly online and reconnecting with the unmediated natural world. In her continued exploration of celebrity, Dorney brings lyrical playfulness and beauty to pervasive influencer culture, bodily hyperfixation, movement, calendars, and cycles.
PRAISE FOR YES I AM HUMAN…
"In Erin Dorney’s Yes I am Human I Know You Were Wondering, the distinction between the I and the You—already pretty flimsy in my experience—gets even murkier. Dorney orchestrates its eventual conflation through metaphysical prose poems and organically unsettling collages that foreground the power differential between an ever-widening range of relations: celebrity and fan, teacher and student, beloved and lover, pixels and flesh, writer and reader. She weaves Adriene’s wellness speak and broad directives through deftly described loneliness (‘We are the taxidermied trying to twist.’) and word music (‘Lies leaf-out late—clotted and dirty.’). Dorney writes, ‘An illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation’ and I nod, happy to be lost alongside her in the slipperiness of the real."
—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors
"I love Erin Dorney’s new collection of epistolary poems Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, so vivid, so tender, pained and human, moving through 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ videos with such evocative curiosity—epistolary as in I reach, I long for, as in I long towards, Adriene's voice floating in and out like a visiting angel. Dorney's poems, like her collages, are beautiful assemblages, made of the literal stuff of life. Somehow Dorney bends epistolary address towards elegy and utopia at once, a methodology for collective dreaming—a gift."
—Wendy Xu, author of Phrasis
“Erin Dorney’s brain is performance art reaching for new emotional levels in this collection of letters/poems and collage work. The loneliness of the pandemic is made tangible through soul, or rather source searching, yoga, and the need to reach out for human connection. Here we have an introspection that becomes full-bodied."
—Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident
"‘What’s being done is nothing. Imagine yourself as a baby. Now, imagine a whole country of that.’ Dorney’s prose poems—diaristic and epistolary, questing and questioning—chronicle a pandemic month of isolation and helplessness, rage and wonder. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering may be rooted in a parasocial relationship through Youtube, but Dorney offers us more than a time capsule or a one-way mirror—these poems reach out and touch, returning us again and again to the body (‘the soft coiled curve of each foot’), to the imagination (‘we are spongey, a new breed of grabbers’) and (‘How can there be so many different shades of green?’) to love."
—Annelyse Gelman, author of Vexations
“There's an infectious exuberance in Yes I Am Human, in these epistolary missives that are both breathless and halting as they catalog desire, yoga, absence, awful ordinary objects, and the awkward, tender practice of waiting, even if it's for both simply ‘a way to take back touch’ and an impossibly encyclopedic list of wants like ‘fewer people, less caring, engine data, propeller theory, an owl to fly out of a tree.’ Erin Dorney has made a book that captures what's both quietly nourishing and unsettlingly abstract about our most mediated forms of sociality, so that when we encounter ‘an Undefeated season of noise’ we think it could go on forever, even when we know the image will eventually go out like a light. The sharp, capacious moments captured in these poems glance against each other and accummulate into a noisy structure of feeling that reaches far beyond these pages."
—Julia Bloch, author of The Sacramento of Desire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Dorney is the author of I Am Not Famous Anymore: Poems After Shia LaBeouf (2018), Grating, Darling, Full of Dirt (2023), The Usual Arteries (2024), and many zines. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Tolka, Passages North, Juked, Bone Bouquet, and HAD, among other publications. Her literary artwork and installations have been featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Susquehanna Art Museum. She holds degrees in librarianship and creative writing, is the co-founder of Fear No Lit, and lives in the non-city part of New York. Find her online at erindorney.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub date: March 4, 2025
Print Length: 80 pages
Dimensions: 5×7”
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-957392-36-3
ABOUT THE BOOK
Like millions of others, Erin Dorney discovered Adriene Mishler's "Yoga with Adriene" YouTube videos in 2020, while isolating at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering collects epistolary prose poems written to—and in conversation with—the popular influencer, along with a series of image-text collages. Arranged in a thirty day cycle, these hybrid works test the boundaries of parasocial relationships during a time when many individuals were both highly online and reconnecting with the unmediated natural world. In her continued exploration of celebrity, Dorney brings lyrical playfulness and beauty to pervasive influencer culture, bodily hyperfixation, movement, calendars, and cycles.
PRAISE FOR YES I AM HUMAN…
"In Erin Dorney’s Yes I am Human I Know You Were Wondering, the distinction between the I and the You—already pretty flimsy in my experience—gets even murkier. Dorney orchestrates its eventual conflation through metaphysical prose poems and organically unsettling collages that foreground the power differential between an ever-widening range of relations: celebrity and fan, teacher and student, beloved and lover, pixels and flesh, writer and reader. She weaves Adriene’s wellness speak and broad directives through deftly described loneliness (‘We are the taxidermied trying to twist.’) and word music (‘Lies leaf-out late—clotted and dirty.’). Dorney writes, ‘An illusion describes a misinterpretation of a true sensation’ and I nod, happy to be lost alongside her in the slipperiness of the real."
—Sommer Browning, author of Good Actors
"I love Erin Dorney’s new collection of epistolary poems Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering, so vivid, so tender, pained and human, moving through 30 days of ‘Yoga with Adriene’ videos with such evocative curiosity—epistolary as in I reach, I long for, as in I long towards, Adriene's voice floating in and out like a visiting angel. Dorney's poems, like her collages, are beautiful assemblages, made of the literal stuff of life. Somehow Dorney bends epistolary address towards elegy and utopia at once, a methodology for collective dreaming—a gift."
—Wendy Xu, author of Phrasis
“Erin Dorney’s brain is performance art reaching for new emotional levels in this collection of letters/poems and collage work. The loneliness of the pandemic is made tangible through soul, or rather source searching, yoga, and the need to reach out for human connection. Here we have an introspection that becomes full-bodied."
—Kevin Sampsell, author of I Made an Accident
"‘What’s being done is nothing. Imagine yourself as a baby. Now, imagine a whole country of that.’ Dorney’s prose poems—diaristic and epistolary, questing and questioning—chronicle a pandemic month of isolation and helplessness, rage and wonder. Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering may be rooted in a parasocial relationship through Youtube, but Dorney offers us more than a time capsule or a one-way mirror—these poems reach out and touch, returning us again and again to the body (‘the soft coiled curve of each foot’), to the imagination (‘we are spongey, a new breed of grabbers’) and (‘How can there be so many different shades of green?’) to love."
—Annelyse Gelman, author of Vexations
“There's an infectious exuberance in Yes I Am Human, in these epistolary missives that are both breathless and halting as they catalog desire, yoga, absence, awful ordinary objects, and the awkward, tender practice of waiting, even if it's for both simply ‘a way to take back touch’ and an impossibly encyclopedic list of wants like ‘fewer people, less caring, engine data, propeller theory, an owl to fly out of a tree.’ Erin Dorney has made a book that captures what's both quietly nourishing and unsettlingly abstract about our most mediated forms of sociality, so that when we encounter ‘an Undefeated season of noise’ we think it could go on forever, even when we know the image will eventually go out like a light. The sharp, capacious moments captured in these poems glance against each other and accummulate into a noisy structure of feeling that reaches far beyond these pages."
—Julia Bloch, author of The Sacramento of Desire
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Dorney is the author of I Am Not Famous Anymore: Poems After Shia LaBeouf (2018), Grating, Darling, Full of Dirt (2023), The Usual Arteries (2024), and many zines. Her writing has appeared in DIAGRAM, Tolka, Passages North, Juked, Bone Bouquet, and HAD, among other publications. Her literary artwork and installations have been featured at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Susquehanna Art Museum. She holds degrees in librarianship and creative writing, is the co-founder of Fear No Lit, and lives in the non-city part of New York. Find her online at erindorney.com.
BOOK INFO
Pub date: March 4, 2025
Print Length: 80 pages
Dimensions: 5×7”
Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-957392-36-3