Gathering Thorns (Some Types of Ambivalence)
Abstract:Emily Hunt's long poem "Company" (2019) transcribes in autopsical focus the hasty skilling, drudgery, waste, precarity, and hard-pressed intimacies that gave shape, day after day, to the poet's stint as an employee of BloomThat, an app-based flower delivery start-up. Turning inside-out the timeworn analogy of poetry to flowers, "Company" is a superbly wry meditation on waged labor in a platform economy. More specifically, Hunt applies the hyperrealist grip of her verse to the task of registering a particular feeling endemic to the Global North: the infrastructural creep of the platform as a dominant mode of capitalization. Integrating two different critical approaches to infrastructure, this essay demonstrates how "Company" takes a scene of high decadence—the traffic in flowers in San Francisco, the seat of digital capitalism—and uses it to plumb a set of ambivalent feelings about the social world that many readers will recognize as the very air they breathe.