Strange Machinery: Essays in Impasse,

Miranda Trimmier

2016: A time of crisis, a time for invocations of apocalypse, a time of escalating political and ecological catastrophe and the mass sense that late capitalism is a death machine that must fall. That September Miranda Trimmier lands in the Tucson desert from New York, dragging along the questions on so many others’ lips. How to compose oneself in the face of such upheaval? The usual answers won’t hold. Lost and disoriented, Trimmier embarks on a sprawling project to map the impasse, constellating between past and present stories of displacement and destruction, looking for the scrappy nuts and bolts of another kind of politics. Each essay becomes as much an unlearning as a learning. Visits to a Utah ghost town confront frontier dreams of freedom while asking what people have made of the rubble. A method-acting turn as a noir detective follow the dirty, racist legacies of LA oil production into an investigation of what activist storytelling can and can’t redress. Consideration of a failed quantum computer novella opens onto a tour of Bay Area tech centers and questions about solidarity in an increasingly computer-captured world. Part crisis memoir, part experimental genealogy of US violence, part prehistory of a cyborg future and the latest fascist surge, Strange Machinery is a record of what one writer does when the only path lies in inquiry, contingency, and a creative process that can’t parry brokenness.

Forthcoming March 2027