Sharp insights abound in Price’s crisp, plain-spoken verse (on the shopping cart icon: “Is this the archetype of America, the bin // We can never fill?”), and Price’s emotional range is broad enough to encompass satire, despair, and flashes of real feeling, especially in lines on icons whose designs harken back to the world before: paper clips, paint brushes, the three-columned facade of a bank. “Nothing says bank like a Greek temple // Holding your money, blocking // You from whatever is left”, Price writes. The poet’s voice is knowledgeable and often funny, exposing the strangeness and power of such easy-to-overlook images (like the “Angular and sharp” Bluetooth “rune”) with wry asides and deeply human expressions of longing for greater connection.

Price’s poems shine brightest when they reach to the tangible or some personal history. While well-articulated and eminently readable, their overall brevity (usually around five to six lines) at times limits their depth, and the deeper, near-religious experience of icons suggested in the introduction is often lacking in the poems themselves. Sill, Icons both invites and playfully rewards readers for thinking more deeply about the standardized symbols of our digital lives, with many striking observations.

Takeaway: Incisive poems urging a closer look at the iconography of the digital era.

Comparable Titles: Lan Donne’s Whispers from the Web, Wesley Bishop’s The Digital Self.

Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A