Where does our Googling go? Well, of course we know that people somewhere own it all, whether it be a late night investigation into Lee Iacoca’s death or a search for alternatives to tortilla chips. Even if one uses an alternative browser that leaves no tracks, our impetuousness, curiosity and wandering is still unaccounted for, maybe even smited by our regret for going down the rabbit hole once again. Luckily, Caroline Knox’s Hear Trains delights in vagrancy. In her unabashed embrace of our modern meandering, Knox somehow captures and elevates the transient nature of life in 2019.

It’s impossible to render Knox’s iridescent intelligence here, but one striking theme across the book is her application of lexical constraints to yield meaning. As Knox riffs within linguistic confines, she explores both the boundless distraction of our lives and also the undeniable intimacy we have with technology. In “Look,” Knox leads us from paper to digital to skin: “Look, the Internet doesn’t have a watermark/ because it isn’t print; it has a hashmark/ and other terms, which earmark/ IT experience as a birthmark.”

But just as our online data makes arguments about us and also makes us just like everyone else, these poems are rhetorical yet unapologetically discursive and self-effacing. “Cold Blob” moves from blog to globe to dendrites in an exploration of global warming while “Manganese” exploits neon, helium, chromium and the rest of the periodic table to herald human failings. And Knox isn’t afraid to acknowledge her sources; in fact, the source itself is the inspiration. In “Blue Poem,” “Windex martini” appears with “Neruda blue” and “Mel Gibson Braveheart/ blue” before the speaker admits: “I had to google/ ‘indexicality.’”

I had to Google James Hazard, who appears in “Sonnet,” and found his 2012 obituary, which said he was a celebrated professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. That might have been where, by Knox’s retelling, he asked students to read a poem out loud and then said: “The objects don’t/ symbolize anything, they won’t/ lead to anything; they must be/ there for their own sake.” And how does the poem’s speaker respond to the claim? “It turned out true ever after./ Example—Susan Firer, his wife, wrote in a poem:/ The interruption of trees, of words, of nuns in Reeboks.”

While the volume brims with nonsensical, sometimes nihilistic associations, could it be that above all, Knox is celebrating both the deluge of information and our power to notice, to filter it all? Her irrepressible wit both elevates and archives, as seen in “Transept,” where the OED and Google appear together as toys that explode the meaning of a mysterious term of architecture: “…(an OED or google game/ [trans—across; septum—enclosure]” The closing of the poem pinpoints how it feels to lust for unfathomable language:

...I kept reminding myself

unto the ends of the world          swept

aisles and isles going and coming either way

coming and going, monument and document.