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by Terry Wright (Author)
Terry Wright converses with an AI chatbot about the novel Lord of the Flies which produces a satirical and hallucinatory landscape that includes corresponding literary parodies; politicians reversing roles and belting out tunes on Broadway; Donald Trump teaching literature at his failed university; members of the House Weaponization of Government Committee starring in a Tarantino movie; AI fearing "the human writer enemy;" the "woke mind virus" preventing the collapse of civilization into savagery; Golding's novel suffering with a cold and re-shuffling its contents; Mike Pence facing verbal taunts from the fly on his forehead; and even the U.S. Capitol Building discovering it, too, has a song to sing. Such wide-ranging conversations satirize many aspects of contemporary American life, including the January 6th insurrection, MAGA extremism, politics, social media, film, literature, fine and performing arts, history, science, education, pop culture, and even AI itself. All this and more occurs before Wright subsequently scrambles the conversations into new texts called "poem zones" that not only comment on the proceedings, but also "talk back" to both the chatbot and the reader. As he notes in the Introduction: "The bot reflects us back to us. I reflect it back to it."
