Lost Signal, Chris Hutchinson
Palimpsest Press, 2025
Throughout Chris Hutchinson’s Lost Signal (Palimpsest Press, 2025), Hutchinson has one ear to the ground: “[b]eneath this rust- / red trestle bridge, the river froths / and foams,” and the other ear to “the virtual edge of this screen.” And, seemingly, these two ears are deliberately placed in the virtual and actual, causing the signals in these poems to be lost—as the title suggests. Mimicking a brain bombarded by constant Tik-Tok refrains and news headlines, these poems move and play in a way that only someone attuned to the language of the internet can move. Filled contrasts such as “hills like fluffy clouds” and “Exxon Mobil / logos,” Hutchinson manages, within one poem and within the book, to expertly place these soundbites of information—clouds and logos, skin and steel—beside each other, both in argument and conversation.
In the titular poem, Lost Signal, Hutchinson wants “you” to
Ping me with your promises
from decades down the tracks.
Sing me to sleep.
Tonight, I’m a surgeon
cutting myself open
with the virtual edge of this screen.
[...]
You’re just radio waves.
I’m the touch of a touchscreen
away. Please reply before I fall asleep
again. Promise to write my name
on the crumbling Empire’s sky
with your spire-like pen.
This initial poem captures the major gestures and movements made throughout the book, but also gets to what I think is the most important idea Hutchinson explores, which is person-to-person connection, whether it be as resistance, or as love (is there a difference between those two?). Beyond the timely and important discussions of the “crumbling Empire” and the “spire-like pen,” suggesting that the pen is no longer mightier than a sword but has become a spire, there’s a deep exploration of how to truly connect in a world that’s always so connected, maybe too connected.
Hutchinson wants this “you,” maybe us readers—or another “you” that I’m not sure of——to be there for the speaker, to “sing them to sleep,” but they’re “radio waves,” a wavelength without colour. This “you” is “just a touchscreen away” but completely invisible to us. How can we connect with each other when we’re so close but still imperceivable to each other? When machines do the writing for us, when there seems to be a constant hum of environmental, humanitarian, social, and political crises intruding our thoughts, lives, and media, how can we connect and build community to deal with these intrusions? This collection of poetry is exactly this—intrusive thoughts, intrusive media, intrusive nations and people, because Hutchinson is “[...] talking irrational urges — not inside / the tangible world, [...] / but within these hot flickers of icy hate.”
These intrusions, these “irrational urges,” seep into the language of these poems. Disjunctive, shifting like video shorts that show the destruction of a city to a cat video with the single swipe of a finger, Hutchinson shifts image and idea with the swipe of a line or stanza, like when Hutchinson says, “elderly, childish, / and lazy” putting the adjective “lazy” beside “elderly” and “childish” is a fun little candy to suck on. This quote, here, is from the long poem in the second part of the book, “This is Not a Poem.” Taking up the entire second section, this poem has two things that stand out: one, this symbol that breaks up sections of the serial poem:
and two, how each section functions almost as a standalone poem. This section, to me, feels like the book is catching signals—disparate, constantly cutting off—but something can be pieced together. I want to decode and stabilize the meaning of these poems that the broadcasting signal on the page is trying to send, but it often comes out as “egregious, irrefutable / error.” This is because “this is not a poem / yet. Poems don’t exist / until we close the book / and walk (or fly) / away.” I agree; in order for poetry to connect people, we need to put the book down and soar into each other, and for the poem to become greater than the book, for it to find a source of lift.
Yet, we are so often glued down to the “virtual edges” of our phone screens. The intrusive foot kicks us, algorithmically feeding us literally everything, from “a heartless archer / shooting billionaires up / into target-less space” or “lithium wars, pandemics, and unexpected roaming fees,” the question then becomes, to Hutchinson, how we can really, deeply connect with each other in order to organize against the growing barrage of crises, and how to love, especially “when the signal’s lost / when we know ourselves again / as strangers—” Can language do the connecting? Maybe poetry? Hutchinson doesn’t believe this, I don’t think, not unless we become “free of Earth’s surly grammars,” and because we are trapped in ”your geography, cosmology, religion, and dead / semantic weight.”
This requires more nuance though, because in my eyes, Hutchinson does think that language can do this connecting: “like the word love that lives / in clover,” but the issue is that people take phrases, refrains, (think about the children!) and they misconstrue them, forcing apart people who need to connect. In the poem “According to the Art of Hunger,” Hutchinson uses an epigraph of Rich, who says that “art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner-table of power which holds it hostage.” Indeed, what these poems in the book are doing, I think, is questioning how the quick-hit dopamine producing algorithm of the internet reproduces new and old forms of hatred; how it's “pretending to be meek-eyed, easy going, detached / from history,” but is actually held hostage by power, by the “good little colonialists” who control the land, the news, the social forums we engage in, and how this is constantly intruding into our lives: “so, as the village floods with breath / soft as bed sheets warmed from sleep, be sure to choose / a more modern idiom.”
Hutchinson, in Lost Signal, explores what it’s like to “flit like a sparrow / between cable news channels while / scrolling on the endless runway of [our] phones, playing dice / with [our] mind’s attention;” what it’s like to be bombarded, intruded on, by news, crises, while being so distracted by all of it, as in the epigraph of Stein in the first section of the book: “everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” In these poems, Hutchinson manages to capture this distracted, intruded mind through quick changing, disjunctive lines, all filled with the constant surprise that the algorithms thrive on. Attuned to, yet slightly cynical toward, the power that language has to connect people, Hutchinson questions and explores how history, language, and the internet can bring people together to fight and resist against the literal bombardment of cities, the collapse of the environment, the power that poetry has in these moments, yet also questions how this very internet also divides, causes us to forget history and the power of language, how it causes us to “follow our bliss / into hell.”
Alex Deng is a Chinese-Canadian writer who lives in Toronto. He has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Frozen Sea Poetry, is forthcoming in Genrepunk Magazine, and is the author of the chapbook Fuzzy Trace (solipCYST press). He has an M.A in English from Trent University.
