Whatever erudition after the internet should mean, when the world’s remaining bibliomaniacs includes a handful of algorithms all too blasé about copyright, the poetry of Courtney Bush is confidently odd, like taroists and sidewalk palm readers. With the post-ironic resurrection of confession, desiring to tell it, not slant, but with tongue-in-cheek candor requires a tour de force of voice. Allergic to that which is merely insincere as well as nihilism’s grave simplicity—the latter jealous of the properly wry hollowness of Dada—Bush jokes seriously. If rarely straightforward (“at this point, / I understand exactly half of everything” (2)), this results in language that is compulsively novel, as crammed with names and personal effects as a Tracy Emins installation. Irretrievably recherché here and there,

I made the mistake of talking about Frank O’Hara

To my mother in the car that night

As if pigeons could’ve flown in different directions (62)

it is a wonder that nonetheless the verse doesn’t bottleneck. Indeed, Bush’s skill lies in refracting stories through strata of inanimate and human bric-a-brac—“[b]eta fish in glass orbs next to Ziploc bags of neon gravel” next to the “undercover Russian officer at the bottom of the stairs” (78)—without altogether losing you. Bush routinely allows a break to replace the soft pause of a comma, and when the drama of punctuation is detectable between breaths we're caught mildly unawares. The innovation is so blithe, a latter-day Timothy Dexter with the soul of Gertrude Stein:

She saw the video attended the brunch bought a clump of daisies

Sewed jewels into her clothes like a Romanov duchess

Dropped the spoon in Brighton Beach

Where I went once but was too high to sit down

I like being told the plot by a friend I like being sung a song on the spot

[. . .]

I heard a man on the Upper West Side say more like a character than a person

Into his phone I am suffering and I am looking up

For someone to reach down to help me

They are there and sort of paying attention but I can’t get them to understand (77–79)

            While I Love Information recalls other loudly declarative titles, most obviously Chris Kraus’s autofiction-ish account of an infatuation, I Love Dick, surely Bush’s derives from the thinking aloud of kids, something wildly good-natured like I love chocolate! Bush has taught preschool, and I want to believe this bears out the book’s fifteenth-century cover: the classroom teacher as a mocked, all-suffering Christ. Against Picasso’s boast of prolonged and unfeigned guilelessness—his quoted-to-death aphorism that “pretends to know the way a child’s mind works” (12) and which, of course, was only ever an excuse to be a naughty adult—Bush’s emotional leniency resembles that of Dickens, who, in the voice of Pip, chided his Victorian readership that “a child is small, and its world is small.” Alternatively, denaturing life leaves us to get by stringing together hints. This occasionally winds up, instead of funnily redundant, a tad wooden: “And how many times I’ve said I’ll never dance again / How many times I’ve become a trout in a fish stream” (18)—so, a stream? Or, in what hopefully isn’t a Star Wars parody, “These are not the blueberries / You pretend I am” (22). And though she is funny, Bush is at her best when those yes-and-no statements, rather than comprising a litany of tricks, actually collaborate and we are reminded that caregiving is tantamount to nodding sideways at miracles, at their extraordinary dailiness:

My student writes her name on the back of her paper

though she can’t make any letters.

Her faint but constant series of ovals and lines

says Penelope and I can read it. She can read it

though she can’t read.

I will recognize that set of lines and ovals,

the same one she makes every day once she’s gone home

and I’m going through the stacks of watercolors.

This one says Penelope.

If I saw it in a thousand years. (42)

There may be no apter challenge in such an occupation than that defined by F. Scott Fitzgerald as “hold[ing] two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain[ing] the ability to function,” notwithstanding the sad fact that Fitzgerald was unable to do as much himself.

            Bush’s “[p]eople do not speak in sentences.” Irregularities in tonality slip into something close to Wittgensteinese (“I give a value judgment to prepositions / because they have them” (36)) or the dainty phraseology of Sherlock Holmes (“You will sometime be struck by the force of longing in the nighttime” (63)). The goal is not shock, which in art is usually as cheap as a sucker punch, but pint-sized hiccups in the text: “Even I talk to the children this way sometimes I say / We aren’t yelling today, my love / When that’s clearly what we are doing” (12). The going can be hard; with thirty, forty lines beginning in uppercase and ending unpunctuated, the reader must guess that “dancing to harvest / Moon” refers to the Neil Young song, while Valentine’s Day gets capitalized (ambiguities of the To my parents, Ayn Rand and God variety are less of an issue). Or try to decide which is the logical antecedent clause and which the consequent: “There’s a catfight in the rain / Because people love an underworld story” or “Because people love an underworld story / In Australia Tinder’s name is Gumtree Classifieds” (39). In other places, a stanza, stalled mid-gear between deadpan and edgy—two opposed ideas?—might clunk for failing to resist a bit of deliberate nonsense:

Science works only as well as its lowliest practitioner

And they didn’t fingerprint the grass

Snails stand for primordial chaos

The slug that came to eat our dinner had nothing to live for

Nothing to fear

I didn’t mean you when I said someone has to live in Ohio (63)

If the swerve triumphs, as it typically does, it is because Bush expertly undermines a wayward start with a coup from the mundane. To the report of a toddler as highly conceptual, for a particularly charming example, she adds, “I tell her mother as she empties huge cans of Hunt’s tomatoes into a blender” (72)). Her agglomerative whim is such that she will frequently pile up a lot of disposable sentences, their sum rattling like a box of penny matches; but this is limited to the nine “Katelyn” poems, so much so that it asserts itself as a feature. Serial titling has become normal in contemporary poetry (e.g., the twenty-four eponymous “Midwood”s in Jana Prikryl’s Midwood); the imagery in I Love Information, too, makes repeat appearances, such as intoxicated doves, Machiavelli, pomegranates.

            Deeper fixations—revelations and fallen angels (“The quarter hour alone I / read from the Bible on my phone and thought / is this about me?” (75)); an unspecified obsession with James Tate’s The Lost Pilot; the dream of a Babbage-like sonnet engine, a manual Ephraim that poeticizes on command—give the collection its weft, while fictional Greek heroines, including Helen, Cassandra, and Penelope (“you’re still on the cursed boat” (43)), hide in plain sight. Though these poems aren’t strident about whatever parallels could be on offer. Each is a near-cameo from the hum of Western antiquity’s background radiation that lashes the book’s sillier material to famous masts: “I saw a kid dabbing and flossing,” we’re told, “At the Hilma af Klint show” (33). It is a dry silliness—a kind of indulgence, really—that bothers to mention a “sinister” guinea pig, then floats a theory, attributed to a children’s author, that fairies are without pity. Throughout, collisions of death and meme-speak abound; and it’s weirdly moving, as when killed subway commuters are said to “enter saint mode” (23), besides a passing reference to Sandy Hook. In another poem, a cat with a Slavic name “entered the chat” (72). Earlier, a list of things Bush did, presumably in her own youth, sounds like a postcard home from summer camp: “I got in trouble / I doodled on the script / I held the knives” (27). The truth is that minutiae is equally capable of leaving us wounded:

There was a creek behind my sister’s house I loved

for how stupid it made me feel

not because I believe nature is omniscient,

I don’t, and I don’t go there anymore.

My friends drunk riding 4-wheelers

into power lines don’t really go away.

I rejoiced in the lamb. I was asked

was I real or fake,

did I prefer Ashley or Mary-Kate?

Men said I love you but meant

they had done something wrong which I would find out about later,

broke into my house, cracked the Italian figurines

when they swung their long legs over the back of the couch.

I waited on the curb for someone named Brock to pick me up.

I wondered if a sword could blaze. (43)

The author founds her own paradise in “a heaven of facts without context” (37), yet with a touch of doubt, depending on how one reads of her “growing concern [. . .] that the instant / was not the unit of experience that interested me” (43), that “[i]f you write about boring things it’s going to be boring” (79). I Love Information exalts in the struck flash, from a nod to the Brontës’ landscape to the present’s most transient colloquialisms. “I had a dream in my head,” says Bush; and the obstacle lies in sharing that which must be taken at the dreamer’s word.