Oh You Robot Saints! by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021. 96 pp. $15.95 (paperback)

The word “robot” was introduced to the English language and a genre of international literature in 1920, by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, in his science-fiction play, Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, or Rossum’s Universal Robots. His view of the future, circa 2000 AD, takes place on an island factory where a company has been churning out robots; by now they are cheap and ubiquitous, and have become the inevitable servile class, slaves, without wage or respect or souls. Obviously by the end of the play they revolt and overthrow their creators. It’s the ur-I,Robot, –Terminator, –Matrix, and it’s fitting that Rebecca Morgan Frank’s new collection Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series) bears an epigraph from the play: “But being without a grain of humor, he took it into his head to make a vertebrate or perhaps a man.” This “making” of living things is the collection’s fascinating preoccupation. Frank, the author of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country, The Spokes of Venus, and Little Murders Everywhere, has written a beautiful, frightening manifesto on the anxieties of automation; it roots in fears about human obsolescence, uncomfortable questions of what makes a thing “living,” the humility of being an organic intelligence in the face of relentless mechanical improvement, and the terror of one’s invention finding sentience and autonomy.

Through a presentation of historical exhibits, we watch inventions evolve, from the failed offspring of their founding fathers, Daedalus and Descartes, to the primal wood and lambskin “Virgen de los Reyes Automaton, 13th century,” to the toylike “Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck Automaton, c. 1739,” to modern drones such as “robobee,” Frank’s unofficial mascot, “sexless and hard,” with “no allegiance to a queen.”

Why are we driven to imitate life? Why isn’t life enough? One theory the collection suggests is that man’s infertility, the crushing sadness of his inability to give birth, drives him to father fake creation, “always making something where nothing was.” And this is what ruins everything. In “How to Make Your Own Automaton,” a poem that is part godly commandment, part instruction manual, part recipe for the cocktail of denial and hubris that blinds inventors to consequences, Frank’s speaker proscribes the following:

“Tell yourself your creations are
amusements, or machines made to do

the work and leave you to invention—as if
destruction were the sole work of others.

Tell yourself you have built something
that outlasts grief rather

than something that repeats it”

These creations will help humanity, the inventors tell themselves. Stop for a second to consider what could go wrong, and their ambition will waver. “Devote yourself to the resurrection,” the poem begins, in what could be Victor’s Frankenstein’s directive to himself. “Build a body that moves.” Or flies. “Did not Daedalus grasp the danger,” the poem muses, “as he swaddled his son’s agile frame / with a cape of feathers? // And yet, what a wonder, to see your creation launch.” That first thrill is the best it gets for these inventors, whose insane optimism falls, burning, into the sea. Icarus is always the metaphor for cockiness and folly, he who flew too close to the sun, but it was his father Daedalus, designer of the Labyrinth, who should have known better, crafting the wings of wax that would help them escape the palace, not anticipating the Cretan heat, or a boy’s rapture after so long in captivity. So, we put all-mighty, dangerous devices in the hands of reckless multitudes, then act surprised when all goes to hell.

In “Descartes’ Daughter” the philosopher’s miniature wooden child (“her automaton / girl-body built by his grieving hands— / his own Francine had died at only five”) is thrown overboard by a superstitious captain. “The Mechanical Eves” offers a disturbing piece of gossip that, “Edison’s prized talking girls / are rumored to be buried alive / by the thousands.” Bitterness and sarcasm at man’s presumptuous doll-making lacerate the collection.

But what of women who can’t make life? The meat stuck in the teeth of Frank’s collection is that the pursuit of creativity is a sometimes vain exercise in trying to metabolize unacknowledged grief. The pain of female infertility comes as a gut-punch in “The Favor,” a quiet, unsettlingly personal prose poem, contrasted with the beginning exhibition’s more removed irony, about “the time I tried to become one [a mother].” After the, “footlong hysteroscope, kin / to a medieval torture instrument,” the speaker and her friend go to a diner where their server brings “free Cubs cupcakes / because we looked so goddamn sad,” and “like good friends / had split one chocolate and one vanilla / and would never talk about this day again.” But now she is. There is a bleeding and healing in these far-ranging poems, a need to talk about the grief that no one wants to discuss. In “Ode to the Robobee” she adds a haunting epilogue to the story: “My doctor hands me the booklet—my uterus / is removable by a robotic arm. / It enters my body rather than imitating it.” It’s an outrage, the notion of a robot removing her uterus, but also a perfect full circle: out of barren grief, humans invent machines that can make infertility permanent. This ouroboros of a cycle, the organic and mechanical feeding into and out of one another, is echoed throughout the Ode’s structure, a contemporary sonnet crown, in which each poem in the sequence begins with the final line of its predecessor. In the end, the lament circles back to its beginning:

“I long to be its maker, to be the creator
like everyone around me makes
life through lust or labor, a fate we’re
told is natural. There are no fakes:

a bullet-sized wonder, a metaphor for striving,
oh little bee, little robot bee, diving.”

The speaker strives to reconcile her inability to create life through “lust or labor” and see her own fate as also natural. She is the robobee in metaphor: something outside of the hive, something that mirrors it, but isn’t it, exactly. The suffering is in the speaker’s own sense of otherness, her own feeling of lifelessness.

In addition to exploring the imagined motivations of the inventors and mothers, Frank also investigates the feelings of the inventions themselves, presenting what philosophers and scientists in the field of artificial intelligence have dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.” What makes a thing conscious of its subjective experience? Is it the ability to sense, or is it, “Not a bodily lack of the senses, / but a lack of sensibility”? And at what point are these robots entitled to self-direction or autonomy? These poems call on the reader to interrogate the moral question of whether it is right to demand robots do our bidding. Frank writes:

“Robots can do anything you please.

They are up on sexual favors, cordless vacuuming,
and martyring themselves by bomb.

Less effective at deep tissue massage; excellent
at listening to senior citizens. Working on
parking your car.”

Frank’s wry humor belies the deeper philosophical questions at work. She both humanizes the robots by giving them abilities and deficits, and in the same tongue-in-cheek breath markets their servitude as one would a slave. By careful attention to tone, Frank is able to make such lines seem playful, even easy. Underneath is the unsettling question of whether automation is playing god or the next frontier of exploitation.

Oh You Robot Saints! is a timely warning to our audacious age, in which our jobs become redundant even as we continue to search for inventions to save us from mass extinction and planetary apocalypse. The fool’s wish for robotic panacea is another way we evade the grief of our human condition, yet Frank’s satirical, sorrowful examination seems to admire our effort nonetheless, the precarious way we all hope against the odds.