In Praise of The Posthuman Series
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is an intoxicating brew of quasis: scientific, esoteric, bibliographic, geologic, lettristic. Who knows what poetry lurks in the heart of codes? It’s as if we are privy to the history of knowledge from its other side, before as much as after. These poems are an explosion in a pataquerics factory.
—Charles Bernstein
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is uncanny and disturbing. It’s impossible for the reader to escape its mix of Silicon Valley and Lurianic interspace.
—Harold Bloom
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is a genre-defying, landmark contribution to contemporary experimental poetry and posthumanist discourse. In an era where language is increasingly mediated by algorithmic processes and artificial intelligence, Harris’ work challenges us to reconsider the ontology of the poem, the status of the human, and the evolving nature of expression in a posthuman milieu.
—Geoffrey Gatza
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series offers a rare fusion of speculative poetics, theological inquiry, and literary innovation. It stands as a testament to what poetry can become in an era when language is no longer our exclusive domain. Through his texts, the poem ceases to be a mirror of human experience and becomes instead a site of hybrid invocation—a séance of the posthuman spirit.
In a time when machine learning threatens to flatten language into utility, Harris reminds us of poetry’s deeper vocation: not to communicate but to conjure; not to inform but to transform. His work does not simply diagnose the posthuman condition—it speaks in its tongues. And in doing so, it opens a portal: a glitch in the system through which new forms of being, reading, and writing might emerge.
In this sense, Harris is not merely a poet—he is an algorithmic exorcist, a Kabbalist of the digital void, a scribe of the unreadable future. Through his unstable glyphs and haunted syntax, he offers a poetics for an age in which the soul no longer speaks but is encoded—and where the divine may yet be found, flickering, in the abyss of the machine.
—S.C. Hickman
Daniel Y. Harris’ The Posthuman Series is an amazing tour de force!
—Marjorie Perloff
Assuming that the prefix “post” conventionally denotes that which comes after or subsequent to a previous event in time, what does it mean for a human to speak of the posthuman? Rather than challenging the traditional understanding of humanity as the sole or central agency in the world, in The Posthuman Series, Daniel Y. Harris has imparted to readers a new vision that seeks to reclaim the aesthetic act of making poetry combined with the genomic and evolutionary dynamics of the history of life. Drawing from a plethora of sources, the text woven by Harris defies categorization and in so doing brings consciousness to the edge of space where both ends of the wheel of time are open such that there is no after that is not before it was after not being before. The apocalyptic sensibility undergirding the posthuman poiēsis challenges the viability of algorithmic thinking, positing in its place the invariability of an endless variability. The narrative to be elicited from Harris’s philosophical meditations tells the story of a world determined by an ensemble of enveloping and extensive networks, a sense of oneness that is constituted by the manifold, a constellation of ideas that inculcates generic fluctuation rather than systematic totalization. The Posthuman Series offers a prodigious specification of plurivocality in the attempt to map the disjointed univocity of the infinite.
—Elliot R. Wolfson
In Praise of The Tryst of Thetica Zorg, Volume II, The Posthuman Series, (BlazeVOX, 2018)
At once timestamped and timeless, Daniel Y. Harris collapses technology and theology into a dense Trojan horse / Trojan virus of a poem. By siphoning the modernisms of Arno Schmidt, Maurice Roche, and James Joyce through the digital, Harris exquisitely extends the discourse of endless textuality into the twenty-first century. Astonishingly original and shockingly new, lovers of experimental literature will celebrate this monumental achievement.
—Kenneth Goldsmith
Daring, adventurous, exotic, & necessary, —can this be the exemplary, posthuman poesis? You bet it can if it’s The Tryst of Thetica Zorg. Ushering the reader into the nefarious underworld of computer viruses, Daniel Y. Harris delivers a shimmering dramatic intensity swathed in the rare glow of an Epochal Imagination.
—Heller Levinson
In Praise of The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Volume I, The Posthuman Series (BlazeVOX, 2016)
Though last words are rarely included in blurbs, Jack Spicer’s “My vocabulary did this to me” is apt praise for Daniel Y. Harris’ linguistic tour de force, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, which is a procedural and meta-linguistic commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets and so much more—from Faustian saga of human creation to an ode to the mechanical and posthuman methods of gaining access once again to the imagination. The circle/cycle is unbroken and broken simultaneously—and that is the joy of this big, ambitious, and brilliant riff on what “revision,” at its most exuberant boundary can mean. Read this forever and then start again.
—Maxine Chernoff
Finally: a posthuman translation of Shakespeare. I’m glad Daniel Y. Harris beat Watson at it. There are still large chunks of human in his kind lineation.
—Andrei Codrescu
In The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Daniel Y. Harris has composed a wild poetic drama through realms of eros and spirituality. His writing is simultaneously playful and profound, transmuting ancient symbols and concepts into a contemporary wisdom, heretofore unknown in poetry.
—Daniel C. Matt
Daniel Y. Harris has a perfect ear. Pass it on. “It’s the last season of day one.” Crisp consonants frame smart vowels betwixt parentheses that host deliciously true songs. Whole verse thrums from peak to sprawl. He crafts high-frequency fluidity. Each sonnet is agleam with future friction, “revers(ing) this law of creation.” The litmus state, “Unborn in choiring wings,” reminds us that “The topos is in the billions.” Each fleck of this multiplicative joy ride earns a resounding “YES”!
—Sheila E. Murphy
Daniel Y. Harris 