Reclaiming our gaze

A Review of Arch Hades’s 21C Human

So far as literature reflects life, most joys have a darker underbelly: the painful conditions that drive us to seek and define light to begin with. In Arch Hades’s work, 21C Human is the inferno to Arcadia’s heaven, their valence a nuanced dialogue with the times. While many back-to-back books serve as a call and response, Hades wrote these collections in tandem during the pandemic. “I poured all my hopefulness and joy into Arcadia,” she said when we spoke. “21C Human is what remained.”

The bulk of 21C’s existential reproach is directed towards the media—its mediums and messages, going back to McLuhan’s seminal phrase. But, as Hades diagnoses, since these earlier media theorists gained traction in the 20th century, social media has proliferated beyond their imagination. Our management of these platforms, whether personal or political, hasn’t caught up. As the epigraph by E.O. Wilson maintains, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology.”

Playing with notions of duality, 21C Human also describes a cycle of desire and lack reminiscent of Lacan’s mirror stage. After the brief recognition of our own images on the screen, we feel othered from this ideal self that’s been curated and cropped and edited. Accordingly, Hades writes, “More often than not, [the pictures] are not authentic representations of us, and we end up competing not just with others for ‘likes’, but now with better-looking versions of ourselves that exist on our phones.”

The collection’s form and layout evince this instability. Combating the media’s erratic, untrustworthy narrator, the “I” throughout 21C shifts constantly. The poet speaks as trapped millennial, scorched woman, steady philosopher. There’s a departure as well from Hades’s usual formalism. In contrast to end-rhymes and parallel stanzas, 21C Human is composed of free-verse poems bracketed by essays that, set against the political tendency to prevaricate, are refreshingly to-the-point. Of the newspaper clippings that frame each section, Hades says, “The collages I made were kind of like my coping mechanism [during the pandemic]…I was trying to stay as connected as possible to the outside world.”

At the end, the words are brought back not to earth, but to water. Throughout the collection’s final section “21C Plague”, we see imagery of seas, floods, lagoons. The impermanence is both threatening and soothing. “Rest here, adrift, in this secret asylum,” she writes in “Lagoon.”

Given her prominence on social media, I asked Hades about how she mediates her participation in the system she critiques. Acknowledging the near-necessity of artists to use social platforms, she says, “I try to use it in the most authentic way possible—and in a way that will still shield me.”

She brings this sense of agency to the collection’s final notes. While less triumphant than in Arcadia, existentialist philosophies still offer the poet, and her readers, the hope of direction. About “Hotel Breakfast,” Hades says, “I thought, as long as I can afford this hotel breakfast, everything will be more or less okay. At that time, I was focused on the next little steps…”

One of her quietest poems, “When we’re grasped by what we cannot grasp,” captures this feeling best. “I choose to fight the small / I choose to fight the small,” it ends. Through repetition, Hades creates a new resonance and suggests that before we conquer the abstract and unmanageable, perhaps addressing what’s in front of us will be enough.