At first glance, Erin Dorney’s collection Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering possesses several things that would scare me away: influencers, trendy yoga, and it’s a COVID book (and I’ve not encountered many successful COVID books yet). Leafing through the book, however, it was Dorney’s nature-inspired collages that drew me in. They have a simple graphic quality that places natural elements in concert with spare phrasings, creating their own asemic poetry.

“I can’t decide what body part to use as the thread that stitches me through time and space . . .”

Throughout this work, Dorney weaves together texts ranging from Wikipedia fragments to John Grisham to her own thoughts to create an epistolary dialogue with YouTube influencer Adriene Mishler of Yoga with Adriene fame. These one way letters to a face on the screen examine false intimacy and the reflexive tendency to try and find kinship in digital spaces. Dorney’s exploration is in a quiet but unexpected way. Her voice is equal parts humor and contemplative, sometimes both at once, and each poem is paired with full-color collaging of natural textures and text, which lends both a grounding and an enigmatic air. Side-by-side, the colorful earth-bound art against the black-and-white emails to a nature rendered in pixels subtly creates tension while also expanding the beauty of Dorney’s assemblages of image and word.

“You say, notice how you feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying.”

Overall, Dorney’s Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering is a fun, relatable contemplation of modern life and the pursuit of connection, through flawed bodies or flawed online mediums, and how, if nothing else, it is our mind and its never-ending pursuit for meaning that persists across all plains, across all times and environments.