Binary Planet

About Henry Crawford

Henry Crawford’s poems have appeared in journals including Boulevard, Copper Nickel, and The MetaWorker among many others. His first collection was American Software. His poem “The Fruits of Famine” won first prize in the 2019 World Food Day Poetry competition.

Praise for Binary Planet

Crawford is a techy madman offering a new code of poetry to a new iteration of readers. Binary Planet is an arresting collection unlike any you’ve ever seen, full of finely tuned poems where computer coding [and especially square brackets!] invades and wreaks havoc on conventional rhetoric and sense. Bravo, Henry Crawford, for coloring outside of the lines!
—Bill Yarrow, author of Accelerant and Against Prompts

In Binary Planet, Henry Crawford explores a world on the cusp of machine dominance in which binary code is poised to overshadow verbal language as the global lingua franca. But the planet depicted in this book is also “binary” in that it is shared between human and machine—as well as teetering on the (similarly binary) cusp of hope and dread for “Walhalla[’s] . . . crystal cities / . . . stacked like fragile boxes / on skylines of denial.” As fluent in poetry as he is able to “awaken the logic of desire / in [the] wordless language” of code, Crawford explores a wide range of ramifications of the contemporary entanglement between human and machine, such as hunger, racism, and war. Nonetheless, these poems never lose sight of the ephemeral beauty of the everyday, the “highway lights spin[ning] a circus / wheel of [stars and signs]/ . . . along the plains of the gasoline / night” on which the reader, like the perceptive narrator of these rich and varied verses, is still “happy /. . . to be [stopped.]”
—Susan Lewis, author of Zoom and Heisenberg’s Salon

Witty and mischievous, Henry Crawford’s book will be one of your favorites this year because you can feel him discovering the poem as he writes it. That’s why each page is so fresh and true—because the poet is connected, at that moment, to the word. Innovation is my favorite flavor in the world because it makes everything move forward, and Crawford does this, poem after poem in Binary Planet, exciting us with ingenuity and originality, meaning, and form. If you ask what I want most in poetry, I’ll say “intelligence” and “surprise.” This time I got it, to my genuine delight.
—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate