O Spam, Poams: Selected Daily Treated Spam September 2003 - January 2005

Poetry. In September of 2003 Rob Read began to edit, transform, and "treat" his incoming junk e-mail (commonly referred to as "spam") into poems which were then sent out again to a list of friends he thought might appreciate them. In fact, the present publisher discovered the first of them in his junk mail box, where his email program had appropriately filed them. Initially sent with no archival copies saved, this collection represents Read's revisiting of these (almost) daily poems, which were luckily saved by a recipient who felt they were important enough to archive. These amusing and quirky poems reveal in subtle ways the nature of online vocabularies that, wanted or not, are a daily feature of most people's lives.