Now We Are Friends

Poetry. In NOW WE ARE FRIENDS, Robert Fitterman takes on some of the prime features of our intensively-networked present—the broad, continual scatter of personal information through blogs, databases, and social networking sites; and its (frequently uncomfortable) return as the stray filaments find their way back to us and "that me" trumps "me me" in other social contexts. NOW WE ARE FRIENDS blows these effects up to archival proportions, replacing the momentary slip (that terrible drunken photo) with raw scale by pulling together all findable traces of an identity online or the adventures of a name: "Ben Kessler," circa 9/2010. (With "Coda: Following Rob," by Steven Zultanski.)