"In an era when so many are turning to generative AI large language models to seemingly conjure language from the ether, The Wiki of Babel reminds us how much can be discovered in what already exists. It takes as its premise the web part of the “world wide web,” of which hyperlinked Wikipedia is an exemplar par excellence of these embedded connections. Using simple browser-based tools and the collectively authored language of Wikipedia, Flemmer sets out on a wander. By intentionally using randomized and Oulipian processes at different turns of these “walks,” Flemmer traces the routes that knowledge takes from one idea to the next.
The arrival at connections and meanings reveals its own kind of tractable latent space. But these are not the pastoral wanderings of a poet through arcadia. Wikipedia mirrors the world and like the world it is threaded through with war, imperialism, pandemics, and political violence. These are the facts and the poems do not shy away from them. The intimate romance of “we form physical bonds” in one poem gives way to “They were killed in a U.S. drone strike” in another. The truth of that lurch captures how information, facts, and feelings actually move. The poems do not let us forget that the web of connections is also a web of consequences. The Wiki of Babel celebrates the rich poetics embedded in the language of collective information and shared history, taking us to places both surprising and devastating."
— Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, author of Travesty Generator
"Kyle Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel surveys the poetic possibilities of Wikipedia, wikiracing, collage, erasure, and substitution and discovers poetry that may not look like anything you’ve seen before, but feels immediate, present, and prophetic. Every page is a poem from the future, using the tools of today."
— derek beaulieu, author of Do It Wrong: How to be a Poet in the 21st Century
"The Wiki of Babel underlines that Flemmer is one of the most inventive writers in Canada today. This book, in its play and action, surfaces the contemporary collective unconscious through associative jumps and multilingual juxtapositions. These works are both instruction and poetry, surprising and puzzling, simultaneously roadmaps between wikis and sonnets, imagist works and hyperlink reportage. There is a hidden hand behind the random number generators and N+7 here, Flemmer’s and ours, writing by connecting words, phrases, lines, stanzas across the multiple expanses of the Internet’s knowledge."
— Aaron Tucker, author of Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys
"In The Wiki of Babel, Kyle Flemmer playfully reconfigures what is documented of our shared knowledge. Paying homage to conceptual writing, Oulipo, and hypertext, Flemmer creates linguistic contact zones between what, at first glance, appears distant and unrelated, only to reveal the worlds and words refracting within it, ultimately pointing to the beautiful entanglement of it all."
— Eric Schmaltz, author of I Confess
