"The Uncanny Valley of Procedural Language: on Thubrina by Theric Jepson"(reproducing a review by D.W. Baker)

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I have a review of this reviewer’s book published on the same page. It’s a review-swap thing which is a cool idea. Although I misread the instructions and thought you had to give every book five stars. I was, like, what is this, Uber? But I went along with it. Who knows what stars mean anyway.

Really, the engine(idling is just a cool place to read and publish (see my “Were my band to play the Roadhouse” and “Glitter sifts from sky, sifts hell from beauty or beauty“) and I recommend checking them out.

This is the review:

Reading Thubrina, a bag of procedural tricks subtitled “Theric Jepson rewrites Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend,” is choosing to gaze into the uncanny valley: is this language poetry, or something else? Jepson’s tongue-in-cheek romp through the lexicon of Carpenter’s 2025 hit record comprises one 2,600 word story, 12 poems, 15 “oldtimey black-and-white-life-of-Jesus illustrations” (Jepson defines and explains this choice in the foreword: “Like Sabrina, Jesus was a carpenter”), and what might be considered the main draw of this book: a 16 page appendix with a detailed account of the methods used to generate each text.

Jepson’s command of procedural techniques is impressive. There are Dada games such as n+7 and v+7, in which every noun or verb of a text is replaced with the entry seven places ahead on a dictionary page. By applying the n+7 technique to the lyrics for “Sugar Talking,” Jepson offers readers phrases such as “Boy Scout, do you win a probabilism?” and “Yeah, your paralinguistics mean shiver to me.” There is a google translate algorithm (detailed in the appendix using 4 pages of arrow diagrams) which transforms the lyrics for “Manchild,” resulting in a sequence of uncanny lines: “The boy / Why do you always come to me? / The nest of my life. / Don’t you feel sorry for the innocent woman? / I never heard that be careful / Half of the brain was destroyed.” The book’s most imposing read is a short story designed to include every word from an alphabetized list of words from the original lyrics to “My Man on Willpower.” The text is a leviathan abecedarian of strange contortions, as in a fit of confused dialogue that accommodates four instances of “don’t” as they appear in sequence from the list.

Alongside such impersonal procedures, Jepson rounds out the collection with a number of poems that retain a subjective impulse. The crafting procedures of traditional forms result in one sonnet (using the lyrics of “Such a Funny Way”) and one villanelle (using the lyrics of “We Almost Broke Up Again Last Night”). Jepson also transforms lyrics using subjective semantics, such as “first deleting three words from every line, then [letting] it marinate in forgetfulness before returning to add three new words per line” (using the lyrics of “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”), as well as sonics, such as the poem which “attempt[s] to replace every word while keeping the meter intact” (using the lyrics of “Nobody’s Son”). The subjective encounter with language is also prioritized by Jepson’s choice to avoid listening to the album; according to the appendix, “he definitely will as soon as this book’s for sale.”

How does such an oddball, experimental work fare in the world of starred reviews? The readers most likely to award Jepson’s book a 4- or 5-star rating are those eager fellow travelers into language’s uncanny valley, in the tradition of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, hoping to discern not only what animates the poem, but also what delineates it from inert text. Any unprepared readers—wayward Sabrina Carpenter fans, perhaps, or simply those expecting a more traditional poetics—are likely to award a 1-star rating. This review splits the difference to award 3 stars.

You can buy Thubrina many places, including Bookshop and Barnes & Noble. You can use your library card to access it through Hoopla.