Mira Gonzalez’s poems are quietly defining texts of the digital era

It was the Instagram image that launched a thousand rumours. Three weeks ago, Lily Allen posted a picture of her hand hovering over a poetry collection called i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together, by the American poet Mira Gonzalez. If Allen was simply hoping to alert her followers to a recent book discovery, it was a misfire. The tabloid press jumped on the gesture, reading it as the next in a carefully constructed series of clues that they believe Allen is using to hint at trouble in her marriage. A week later, the front cover of Grazia read “Lily’s Break-Up Message to Husband”, while the Daily Mail Online wrote of “alarm bells” over Allen’s photograph.

View image in fullscreen

Like a mean-girl clique in a teen movie, certain corners of the media love to express their “worry” for Allen by spreading salacious stories about her. This particular story, however, piqued my curiosity because of the unwitting involvement of Mira Gonzalez, a writer I have been following since 2013, when i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was released by a small US independent called Sorry House.

Gonzalez was 21 when this first collection was published, and she is only 23 now. Judging by her social media presence, she appears to spend most of her time in LA, and is often either babysitting or hanging out with a young sibling. She does a lot of poetry readings, and i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was nominated for a Goodreads Choice award and a Believer award. Her second book, Selected Tweets was released last year, and is a selection of tweets collected alongside those of the novelist Tao Lin. Although Gonzalez, with her young, west coast literary life, is not someone you would expect to find in the middle of a UK tabloid storm, there is a certain perfection in her becoming caught up in a story involving a celebrity and a picture from the internet.

Gonzalez writes about the internet a lot, and has a particular talent for describing the absence that a life spent online can create. “And we will understand the phrase ‘alone together’ is not an oxymoron anymore,” she writes in a poem titled symbolic interactionism. In her spare, lower-case poetry, the author edges around loneliness without falling in. She fantasises about snorting Ambien, dedicates herself to being “neutral”, and remembers sexual encounters without shame or emotion. The persona she presents is radical in its contradictions – her voice is both punk and disinterested, both promiscuous and not particularly sexual. In the poem I can read a novel out loud while you lie on my floor with your head in my lap and we can feel happy because we are touching each other and I am using my voice and we don’t have to think about climate change or death, she writes “while we had sex on my floor/ I made noises with my mouth/ and watched cartoons on the TV”.

Whenever I read Gonzalez’s poetry, I think of that scene in the pilot of Lena Dunham’s Girls, in which Dunham’s character Hannah announces to her parents that she is “if not the voice of my generation, the voice of a generation”. I am sure that Hannah would respond well to descriptions like the one in Gonzalez’s poem here is what I ate today: coffee, curry vegetable thing from whole foods, plum: “i feel like 400 dead jellyfish on a freeway.”

In the years since i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was released, in an initial run of 500, it has turned up on any number of social media feeds. Lily Allen wasn’t the first to post a selfie with it – Florence Welch beat her to it. It makes sense that people living in the internet age find themselves drawn to the permanent dusk of Gonzalez’s poetry. It sums up the confusions of an age when we are able to dip into a celebrity’s private life at a whim, or cause a furore with a hashtag, filling our lives with endless photos of ourselves. One phrase from symbolic interactionsim says it all: “I wonder how it is possible that there are billions of people in the world yet I am the only person on the planet.”