DATABLEED READS Alex Glynne’s poems
Political theorist and eco-philosopher Stephanie Erev suggests that the material effects of climate change – ‘atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic’ – permeate, and reverberate within, the body, registering only on a subconscious level (2019, 837). It is in this sense that Alex Glynne’s poems explore the ways in which body and self are permeated by the planetary effects of climate breakdown in ways which interrupt the daily consumption of commodities and the complex nexus of feelings that accompanies that consumption.
Fast fashion features prominently, specifically the kind of oversaturated ‘trends’ pushed by influencers and celebrities on Instagram, such as the outdated ‘dad shoe’ and the ‘crisp white T’. Likewise, there are references to the experience economy, as the speaker explores the dynamics of desire 'above the snow-capped domes of the Adirondacks' or while travelling towards flower gardens in Hokkaido. These landscapes are contrasted with complex emotional ones: ‘poor affective regulation,’ ‘neurotic patterns’, love, hate, indecision, short-lived joy, guilt and, of course, desire. More specifically, what Hediger refers to as the ‘cannibalistic movement’ of consumer capitalist desire; a movement through which we become alienated from ourselves (2019, 222). In other words, in their negotiation of the difficult emotions that accompany the normalized daily consumption of endless commodities, the poems reflect what Hediger terms ‘shopping as suffering’ (2019, 189).
In the poems, as for Hediger, this suffering reflects a kind of homesickness; in wondering ‘whose body your body is’, we are reminded of how consumption disconnects us from ourselves. But the poems also reflect another kind of homesickness – solastalgia, or distress at environmental changes to one’s home environment caused by climate collapse. It is a homesickness experienced while still at home; an inability to effectively parse visible and tangible ecological changes, such as ‘phytoplankton blooms’, ‘coral bleaching’, ‘soil erosion’ or heat fluxes over oceans. These function as weighty and jarring counterpoints to the superficiality of social media and consumer culture highlighted in the poems.
Glynne’s speaker draws a connection between solastalgia and the 1993 Smashing Pumpkin album Siamese Dream, an album characterized by its blend of shoegaze and dream pop: two genres defined by overwhelming waves of nebulous, distorted sound. We might link this sonic haze with the clouds in the poems, which ‘drift through […] headphones’ and, elsewhere, morph into trapped insects. Like Erev’s ‘atmospheric, oceanic, and seismic’ climate change effects, these clouds permeate and reverberate within the body (2019, 837). When caught under glass, they are manifestations of desire, specifically, the impossible object, Lacan’s objet petit a: that which we must ‘separate off as organ’ in order to establish ourselves as a subject (1978, 103). Further, the poems’ reference to data storage reminds us of the cloud as a network of remote servers, which points to the fragmentation of the self into units of constructed digital data from which we are physically and metaphorically disconnected.
This fragmented self, within the poem, has toxic masculine undertones. It is ‘chest day’ and the speaker is ‘halfway to the gym’; an apostrophized ‘you’ is ‘all banana diet and heroic torso’; and the speaker of ‘Ascension’ needs ‘a juicer and a trampoline’. This is the far-right-adjacent alpha-male gym bro culture of social media, personified by gymfluencers like Liver King Brian Johnson, whose jacked physique is the consequence of a diet of raw meat and steroids. To ‘work out’ is, as Llamas-Rodriguez points out, a ‘particular kind of work,’ and ‘late capitalist development thrives on every set of bench presses and deadlifts performed by its workers in their own leisure time’ (2018, n.p.). And if, as the poems suggest, ‘[a]ll the poets are lifting weights’, then what does this tell us about poetry in 2025? Perhaps that it, too, has succumbed to the capitalist logic of fitness, prioritizing neoliberal and individualistic success and competition over the collective action and social responsibility required to address climate breakdown.
Erev, S. (2019) 'Feeling the Vibrations: On the Micropolitics of Climate Change', Political Theory 47: 6, 836-63
Hediger, R. (2019) Homesickness: Of Trauma and the Longing for Place in a Changing Environment, University of Minnesota Press.
Lacan, J. (1978) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Miller, J.A, trans. Sheridan, A., New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Llamas-Rodriguez, J. (2018) ‘Pain & Gain, global workout culture, and the neoliberal ascetic ideal’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, No. 58