Book Review: Kristie Shoemaker’s “do graves get wifi” 

nm..wyd? 

In her 2008 poem “McDonald’s is Impossible,” illustrator and writer, Chelsea Martin, declares: “eating food from McDonald’s is mathematically impossible” (2). What follows, is a dizzying 90+ lines of other things, mainly Millennials, find hard to do, like introducing themselves in a social situation and leaving the house to grab food. Fast forward to the present day, and it seems as though things have gotten worse (1). From FOMO to ghosting, throwing shade and keeping receipts, adulting is, for the most part, hard, AF. So who, or what, do we turn to to quell our anxiety and angst as we scroll, click, like, bookmark, hashtag and stream, and the existential dread mounts? Well, contemporary literature, of course! More specifically, the musings of poet Kristie Shoemaker. 

In her debut, full-length collection “do graves get wifi,” Shoemaker follows in the footsteps of other lol IDGAF writers and poets, like Tao Lin, Elizabeth Ellen, and Kristen Iskandrian, covering everything from body hair to xanax. Replete with awe-inspiring UGH, Shoemaker’s syntactic splendor lies in her ability to give you all the ~feels~, while creating an interesting kinship between observer (reader) and writer--a feat that’s become obviously easier with the advent of social media and our access to each other (and our wavering mental stability). In “the only thing keeping my mental sanity together is maintaining my social media presence (some things i said on the internet from 2016-2017),” she writes: 

my type is sensitive ghost 

been fakin’ it til i make it since 1991 

the worse my life and mental health get the more popular on the internet i am 

sexually attracted to silence 

This sort of voyeuristic poetry, for me, has the reader playing a willing participant in a universal role of Peeping Tom. For Shoemaker, we do it everyday, with our phones, with our cameras, with our iPads--in a perpetual state of creeping. If art imitates life, then her poetry may as well be an extension of the societal narrative of constant access. This blatant exploitation of self in exchange for the acceptance, love and gratitude of strangers on the internet is what makes do graves get wifi comically tragic and simultaneously

brilliant. To what do we owe such blatant narcissism and moments of wild jest about our impending mortality, compressed into a shareable, 45-second video? For Shoemaker, it is our nakedness, poetry and our egos. Similar to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, do graves get wifi makes use of the precious economy at our fingertips: our pasts. While Nelson asks “is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is love itself the disturbance?” (3), Shoemaker answers, in “compilation video of ducks”: 

i don’t need to know what’s real 

digital or organic 

so long as i am as real as you need me to be 

It is with this ruthlessly unapologetic banter between what is and what isn’t, what we choose to reveal and what we choose to veil, that Shoemaker evaluates what emotions are worth the trouble. As Maggie Nelson creeps through the blue, asking questions, Kristie Shoemaker prefers to highlight experiences overlooked--the everything trapped in the mundane trivialities we choose to place front and center, but not really. do graves get wifi is one, giant, reverberating subtweet that trends and dies as quickly as it is born--taking its resting place amongst unsent sexts and Facebook pictures of your best friend’s super ugly baby, and equally as disgusting engagement ring. 

Kristie Shoemaker’s poems are crafted for scenes and blips in memory so specific, you question if any of this content should be released to the public at all for consumption. Why not write a diary? A password protected blog? Write thoughts on a napkin and burn them in your backyard? The see-saw that is contemporary poetry begs the question: who cares? while simultaneously caring A L O T. An existence, for the sake of contemporaneity, and for Shoemaker, is the rich fruit of a dream once unrealized. I recall in Anthony Walton’s essay “Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance,” a moment where elegantly sheds light on the double-edged sword that is a womxn’s identity and her freedom to either express 

or ignore it in favor of other ideas, creatively speaking. He writes “...women of the Harlem Renaissance faced one of the classic American double-binds: they were black, and they were female, during an epoch when the building of an artistic career for anyone of either of those identities was a considerable challenge…” (5). Shoemaker is a womxn at odds with her crippling self-actualization and mental health,

which is heightened by her Millennial need to liken every disadvantage and breakdown to a shift in the core of the celestial universe (i.e. mercury retrograde) and/or unanswered texts. Whatever the situation, Shoemaker’s iterations of the Internet prove that we’ve fed a beast too big and glorious to be killed. We are, at once, apathetic and passionately disillusioned. The poem that proves this is entitled “dear universe, things look bleak,” where she dramatizes: 

i want to scream 

just tell me what to do 

i am pulling away faster than the universe is ripping itself apart 

… 

soon it will spread itself so thin that the weight of it all will just collapse 

i am pretending i am a hologram of my former self 

so that when i walk outside in my bare feet in the middle of winter i can’t feel a thing By the end of it, and I mean earth, or I could just mean this book, or I could be referring to the skin suit you’re forced to wear and wash daily (if you want), the place where all your feelings are trapped inside, you’ll leave asking “do graves get wifi? and if so, will my crush text back?

Author’s postscript to Kristie: You'll never know how much your work has impacted me on a truly visceral level. This book is a quiet sort of magic deserving of celebration.

Works Cited 

1. Fishwick, Carmen. “It's #Notjustyou: Millennials Share Their Secret Fears.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 7 Mar. 2016, 

www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/its-not-just-you-millennials-share-their-secret-fears. 2. Martin, Chelsea. “McDonalds Is Impossible by Chelsea Martin.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2008, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53322/mcdonalds-is-impossible. 3. Nelson, Maggie. “From Bluets.” Pen Poetry Series. 

4. Shoemaker, Kristie. Do Graves Get Wifi. Ghost City Press, 2017. 

5. Walton, Anthony. “Double Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance .” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 20 June 2016, 

www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/double-bind-three-women-harlem-renaissance.

Afieya “Fi” Kipp (they/them/he/him) is a trans artist and poet from  Northern New Jersey. They received their MA in Poetry from Southern New Hampshire University and a BFA with distinction in Painting from Kean  University.