Too Numerous

Kent Shaw

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781625344304
• eBook ISBN: 9781613766811
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

What does it really mean when people are viewed as bytes of data? And is there beauty or an imaginative potential to information culture and the databases cataloging it? As Too Numerous reveals, the raw material of bytes and data points can be reshaped and repurposed for ridiculous, melancholic, and even aesthetic purposes. 

Grappling with an information culture that is both intimidating and daunting, Kent Shaw considers the impersonality represented by the continuing accumulation of personal information and the felicities—and barriers—that result: "The us that was inside us was magnificent structures. And they weren't going to grow any larger."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• The complicated version of unanimity is actually the quiet kind
• The boxes were arranged so they formed a Leviathan
• I’m sorry if the rain was always making your life more confusing
• Any man can make love for 40 days, if he’s making love to himself
• I imagine most molecular arrangements are indifferent to the system they are participating in
• In praise of discipline
• A monument designed for upward mobility
• How high technology might one day be indispensable to our lives
• Definitions of lucky are too numerous
• A story from my romantic past. It was full of misgivings.
• The definition of curtail
• There were bricks put at brick angles
• The invention of psychology, a swan song
• Why God keeps making conviction so easy
• How we found more useful sayings about fences
• Now I understand what maturity is. Thank you, wool!
• People don’t understand what an emotion normally looks like
• My city is not called Ladders
• The drapery in most Renaissance paintings needs attendants to keep it in order
• The history I’m living in right now!
• What we did about a world that kept getting very loud
• A marriage procedure that involves quite a bit of my wife
• Maybe this city needs more men who are not imitations of the man they hate me for not being
• Really, there is no end to ambition
• They would excavate stones and then rearrange the stones in a city like they appeared in the earth
• My fear is that someone would invent a tool to untether me
• An ellipsis could be what language is like when it’s styrofoam
• “I want to give you a spring.” I said to my wife. And my wife only listened.
• This is how ambition looks when it’s blooming
• I was born a bass drum. Not a catapult.
• The definition of OK when you’re only kind of OK
• To mountainize is a verb
• The title of this drawing would be “the prime of your life”
• Actually, this poem belongs to my wife
• What we do when we want to elect a Frank Lloyd Wright
• How to rule out probability
• The sense that balsa wood isn’t really the best decision
• When your middle age is in the middle beginning
• A dramatic reenactment to explain why the internet was started