With an ear to the white noise of advertising, pop music, CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, cereal packaging and MuchMusic, Larissa Lai explores the problem of what it means to exist on the boundaries of the human. The books consists of four long poems: "Rachel,"; a meditation in the voice of the cyborg figure Rachel from Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner and its source material, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ; "nascent fashion,"; which addresses contemporary war and its excesses; "Ham,"; which circulates around the chimpanzee sent up into space as part of the Mercury Redstone missions by NASA and later donated to the Coulston Foundation for biomedical research; and "auto matter,"; a kind of unfolding autobiography told in poems. Larissa Lai, an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of British Columbia, is the author of Salt Fish Girl and When Fox is A Thousand.