Rena J. Mosteirin

Disaster Tourism is a collection that offers glimpses of disasters at once personal and global. The term "disaster tourism" refers to the offensive practice of visiting sites after a cataclysm. Steeped in violence, injustice, immigration stories, and accounts of police brutality, Disaster Tourism gives us a lens to re-imagine our dangerous surroundings in the hopes that we strive toward a better existence, even when it hurts. Born of a Cuban refugee father and a mother whose homeland of Gotteschee is now considered Slovenia, Rena J. Mosteirin's identity and poetry are shaped by the respective lost homelands of her parents. Bold, unflinching, and lyrical, yet laced with a disarmingly clever and sometimes wicked sense of humor, these poems sift through various sites and forms of devastation to reveal moments of love and joy. Mosteirin uses observational wit and arresting clarity to bring us closer to the fires burning all around us. Yet, through it all, there is the interconnectedness of family and community - including our world community - entreating us to carry on with an eye toward helping each other through this challenging life. Ultimately, Disaster Tourism holds a mirror to our broken world and asks: what will you do when you find yourself looking back?

Disaster Tourism is a poetry collection that offers glimpses of disasters at once personal and global. The term "disaster tourism" refers to the offensive practice of visiting sites after a cataclysm. Steeped in violence, injustice, immigration stories, and accounts of police brutality, Disaster Tourism gives us a lens to re-imagine our dangerous surroundings in the hopes that we strive toward a better existence, even when it hurts.Born of a Cuban refugee father and a mother whose homeland of Gottschee is now considered Slovenia, Rena J. Mosteirin's identity and poetry are shaped by the respective lost homelands of her parents. Bold, unflinching, and lyrical, yet laced with a disarmingly clever and sometimes wicked sense of humor, these poems sift through various sites and forms of devastation to reveal moments of love and joy. Mosteirin uses observational wit and arresting clarity to bring us closer to the fires burning all around us. Yet, through it all, there is the interconnectedness of family and community - including our world community - entreating us to carry on with an eye toward helping each other through this challenging life.

MOONBIT is a hybrid work comprised of experimental poetry and a critical theory of the poetics and politics of computer code. It offers an extended intellectual and creative engagement with the affordances of computer software through multiple readings and re-writings of a singular text, the source code of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer or the "AGC." MOONBIT re-marks and remixes the code that made space travel possible. Half of this book is erasure poetry that uses the AGC code as the source text, building on the premise that code can speak beyond its functional purpose.When we think about the 1960s U.S. space program and obscure scientific computer code, we might not first think about the Watts riots, Shakespeare, Winnie the Pooh, T.S. Eliot, or scatological jokes. Yet these cultural references and influences along with many more are scattered throughout the body of the code that powered the compact digital computer that successfully guided astronauts to the Moon and back and in July of 1969. MOONBIT unravels and rewrites the many embedded cultural references that were braided together within the language resources of mid-century computer code.MOONBIT also provides a gentle, non-expert introduction to the text of the AGC code, to digital poetics, and to critical code studies. Outlining a capacious interpretive practice, MOONBIT takes up all manner of imaginative decodings and recodings of this code. It introduces some of the major existing approaches to the study of code and culture while provide multiple readings of the source code along with an explanation and theorization of the way in which the code works, as both a computational and a cultural text.JAMES E. DOBSON teaches at Dartmouth College. He is the author of "Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology" (Illinois, 2019) and "Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies" (Palgrave, 2017), as well as essays and book chapters on intellectual history, American literature, and computational methods.RENA J. MOSTEIRIN is the author of "Nick Trail's Thumb" (Kore Press, 2008), selected for the Kore Press Short Fiction Chapbook Award by Lydia Davis. Her work has been featured in the anthologies "code {poems}" (Barcelona: Impremta Badia, 2012), "The Waiting Room Reader II" (Fort Lee: Cavankerry Press/UPNE, 2013), and a wide variety of places in print and online including New York Magazine, The Puritan, Poetry Crush, Ozone Park, and elsewhere. Mosteirin is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine.