Listen- a poetic creature is an interesting exercise done by Griffin Rockwell. Sentences from 26 different science fiction books, put into one poem. You can feel how much work: the cohesion of it all, the visual, it's not just words or a story; it is a piece of art.

Listen - A Poetic Creature is founded on an interesting and challenging idea: to create Frankenstein's monster of a poem that undoes much of the problematic context of classic science fiction.

The author uses the found poetry form of the cento, a poem constructed from works of other authors placed together out of order to create an entirely new construct. In this case, the poem is constructed from the work of (mostly white, male) science fiction authors. Rockwell uses this construct to explore issues of gender equality and identity in really interesting ways - breaking down the mostly male protagonists and innate misogyny of much early science fiction and turning it on itself to create an entirely new self-awakening.

Listen is a fascinating composition and a really intriguing idea. It's a relatable piece of self discovery, if a bit circular (which I suppose self-discovery is). This repetition and return was likely technical, but it felt like redundancy sometimes, and that may have been in part due to the desire to make the most of the cento form. Still a very interesting read.