NMLCT: Poems by Paul Vermeersch
In NMLCT, Vermeersch gives us his answer to an existence in thrall to the artificial.
Paul Vermeersch’s latest collection, NMLCT, presents readers with a close examination of digital consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the divide between human and machine experience. The title, we learn from the book’s pronunciation note, is pronounced “animal city.” This designation is contrasted with “MCHNCT” (machine city), establishing a fundamental binary that structures the entire work.
“In NMLCT, Vermeersch creates a multimedia experience that mirrors the hybrid nature of contemporary digital life.”
The collection is organized around this opposition between animal city and machine city, exploring the boundaries between organic and artificial life, and also posing whether such boundaries remain meaningful in our contemporary moment.
The visual elements of the collection are particularly striking. The “Startup Page” presents ASCII-art arrangements of letters that function as concrete poetry and literal computer code, embodying the collection’s thematic concerns. Binary code cascades down pages like digital rain, while a “diagram of the known universe” inspired by an “artificial sphere prepared by Thomas Jefferys in 1748” suggests a cosmological map that might equally represent a neural network or circuit board.
In “Welcome to MCHNCT,” Vermeersch writes “you are here. Partially. Same as the spectral cloud now forming inside this sunlit gallery. You are home. Or in your only memory of home. Same thing.” This tension between NMLCT (animal city) and MCHNCT (machine city) becomes the collection’s driving force, capturing our contemporary existence as we navigate between organic and digital realms, never fully inhabiting either.
“The Second Moon Behind the First Moon” establishes a central metaphor: a hidden celestial body that “remains undiscovered, occupying the space of memories never accessed.” This second moon becomes emblematic of our suppressed animal consciousness—the intuitive embodied knowledge that has been eclipsed by our existence in machine city. The poem concludes with a vision of recovery, imagining a green tendril that will eventually carry us back “to the oceans we’ve forgotten, or to the skies, where we’ll remember how to swim, or how to fly. Same thing.” Here, Vermeersch suggests that returning to animal city means recovering fundamental capabilities for movement and being that technology has caused us to forget.
In “Welcome to NMLCT,” we learn that “you cannot plan for evolution without planning for extinction. You cannot write a manifesto without writing a cautionary tale.” This insight makes it clear that any vision of liberation must simultaneously acknowledge what is being lost. The poem presents animal city as a manifesto and warning, a space designed “to liberate the animal” while recognizing that this liberation comes at the cost of our technological advances. Vermeersch suggests that true evolution requires accepting the death of our machine-dependent selves to recover what remains essentially animal within us.
“Midway” arrives near the collection’s conclusion at a moment of reckoning. Here, Vermeersch presents a world where “the shroud of intelligent life is unintelligent life,” collapsing the hierarchies that have structured our thinking about consciousness and existence. We find that “another haunted house is smashed to smithereens. Its rubber skeletons look more real here than they ever did under the dim, synthetic filtered lights above,” suggesting that we have reached a point where artificial constructions feel more authentic than the organic world they have replaced. The binary code that cascades down the page functions as a parallel text, offering meanings that exist beyond human language, yet the poem asks us to consider whether this represents evolution or catastrophic loss. We are made to imagine “future visitors who stumble on this midway” and must piece together what has happened and when, asking “who is the astronaut and who is the ape?”
In NMLCT, Vermeersch creates a multimedia experience that mirrors the hybrid nature of contemporary digital life. The reader must navigate text, image, and code much as we navigate our daily digital environments. The poems argue for the irreplaceable value of human consciousness, intuition, and embodied experience in an age increasingly dominated by algorithmic thinking. NMLCT reminds us that the animal city, however threatened, remains our true home.
About the Author
Paul Vermeersch is a poet, multimedia artist, and literary editor. His last book of poetry was Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995–2020. A professor of creative writing and publishing at Sheridan College, he also edits his own imprint, Buckrider Books, for Wolsak & Wynn Publishers. He lives in Toronto, ON.
About the Reviewer
Selena Mercuri is a writer, publicist, editor, book reviewer, and social media manager based in Toronto. She holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto and studied Publishing at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she received the Marsh Jeanneret Publishing Award. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Room, Prairie Fire, The Ampersand Review, and The Seaboard Review. She is the recipient of the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and was a finalist in the 2024 Hart House Poetry Contest. Selena is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph.
Book Details
Publisher : ECW Press
Publication date : 2 September 2025
Language : English
Print length : 88 pages
ISBN-10 : 1770418350
ISBN-13 : 978-1770418356