Memos from the [20th] 21st Century, by Buffy Shutt

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Memos from the 20th 21st Century is Buffy Shutt’s debut chapbook. Borrowing the familiar template of the office memo, Buffy investigates our everyday concerns of where to get honest answers to questions big and small. Memos From the 20th 21st Century salvages irony and humor from among the ruins of our upheaved world. This hybrid chapbook is part found and erased prose and part poetry in dialogue with an entity known as The Desk.

A satirical and serious exploration into how we sort through the onslaught of information that fills up every corner of our lives, Memos from the 20th 21st Century is a love letter to those seeking guidance and to those trying to provide it. The Desk understands that asking a question is an intimate act. When it comes to inquiries, there is, for The Desk, no hierarchy of importance. Sometimes the only way The Desk can answer an inquiry is with a poem.

Buffy says, "My memos emanate from the notion that using actual articles from legitimate news outlets could provide an engine for excavating parts of our world in both real and imagined ways." Asked about the tone of the book, Buffy adds "I want the various moods of the memos to reflect the constellation of our own moods in this information-laden life. I explore worry: about identity, about loss, about how we look, our choice of words, worry we deleted an essential email."

Whether fielding questions about haircare products, the climate emergency, or the wish to archive our lives, the Desk begins to find her own path through the minefield of information that threatens our planet, our families, our bodies and our capacity for love.

"A delightfully funny while simultaneously alarming read on climate change and the current political assault on women, Memos from the 20th 21st Century does the perfect work of balancing bleak, startling content with a dry, incisive wit. The complexity of the subject matter coupled with the unusual format and tone of the narrator ("The Desk") creates a complicated poetic ecosystem. Shutt offers a fantastic read that will not disappoint."

—Katherine Richards, poet, author, Apple Mind

"Buffy Shutt's Memos from the 20th 21st Century is a lyric hustle. With a wry sense of seeming banality, each poem in the collection pushes the reader to confront the bleak comedy of bureaucratic language and come out the other side with a hair toss and a wink to the knowing. If you've ever been forced to learn to speak in memos, this book is a liberation."

—Marion Wrenn, poet, co-editor of Painted Bride Quarterly, Director of NYU Writing Program, Abu Dhabi

Buffy Shutt, a former marketing executive for movies and documentaries is a poet living in Los Angeles. A two-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears in Anthropocene, Paper Dragon, Sonic Boom, Door is a Jar, Dodging the Rain, Book of Matches, Split Lip Magazine, among others. She has published two novels and her first poetry collection, Recruit to Deny, will be published in 2024. Currently, she is collaborating with younger artists on a work of eco-feminism. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she met her best friend, her husband, and her writing self.