by Luise Noe

On the surface, Torey Akers’ Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto (Grand Central, 2025) explores the counter-hegemonic potential of TikTok and the (fabricated) political outrage against the app on the eve of its ban, which ultimately never was. The anticlimactic eventization and political instrumentalization into which that “ban” ultimately dissolved after the book’s publication—a looming threat continually put off by 75 day increments; an alleged deal being made days before the publication of this review—does not take away, but adds to the appeal of Akers’ ideas. That is because underneath the surface, Revolutionary Algorithms is foremost a negotiation between grief and anger as affects of the 21st century. What one would expect from a book as Akers’, she already delivers: Well-researched examinations of US-China relations, the history of censorship before and on the internet, the tech-state-hanky-pankies within the military-industrial complex, COVID-19 psychologies, and questions of constructed moralities. But beyond that, Akers’ recent loss of both parents always shines through as the emotional ethos of the book. Loss becomes the governing image, not just in the anticipated loss of the app, but in the conception of technology as a trace human absence. According to Akers, our technology is haunted—by us.

Hauntings tend to point to spirits with unfinished business in the material realm. And so, our material world, genocidal and pandemic-ridden, is the backdrop for Akers’ argument. By exploring capitalism’s entanglement in contemporary misery, she reveals TikTok to be a mere scapegoat. This, however, does not result in any kind of blind techno-optimism. Rather, TikTok is a pharmakon, or as Akers describes it at the end of her introduction, neither “crypto-socialist totem nor portal to the promised land but instead […] a self-playing piano trembling with need for human music” (5). TikTok is not just a dance, hate speech, and make-up tutorial scroll of consciousness. There is actually a chance to unleash a revolutionary potential, Aker argues, while letting other activists’ voices affirm and question that throughout the book. To do so, humans need to grapple with their… well, human-ness aka mortality. Importantly, Akers does not ask to simply make peace with death. Rather, her thought requires us to feel it. In her more critical engagement with the technology that brought us TikTok she wonders, “if people invented God, and the internet in his image, to snuff grief’s hungry wick” (85). Akers’ humanism, which grounds her argument, is equally the embrace of individual grief and a directed anger at the excess of death in the world.

Revolutionary Algorithms plays with the fusion of “high” and “low” culture—“if Byung-Chul Han saw a Skibidi Toilet Camerahead” would he rejoice or cry? (67)—to conclusively capture the contemporary condition in writing: Akers style is vulnerable and polemic,  serious and funny, passionate and ironic. Some argument summaries may feel hasty as a result, for example, aligning Walter Benjamin’s take on motion pictures with Socrates’ put down of the written word (48). But it makes the book into a captivating read not just for those who would want to agree with its central thesis. Even if Akers does not persuade you, her prose will make the read so worth it either way. This review is testament of it: this reviewer has no TikTok account and never had one. Regularly suspected to be a secret luddite, none of my personal disagreements with any of Akers’ points took away from my enjoyment of the book. Her great writing, her tone, imagery, and register over and over lets the reading experience resonate like a late night bar argument I would love to have with my smartest friends.

Purchase here. 

Bios:

Torey Akers is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. She holds MFAs from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Hunter College.

Luise Noé is the creative non-fiction editor at Cream City Review. She is currently writing her dissertation about the contemporary novel in algorithmic-digital capitalism.

Maria Zoccola, a queer Southern writer and educator from Memphis, Tennessee, brings the epic to the everyday in her debut collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025). One of her “Helen” poems was previously featured in The Cream City Review, and Zoccola’s work has earned her Best Small Fictions and Best New Poets nominations, as well as a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Here, Zoccola shows off her knowledge of the Classics while keeping her writing voice approachable, giving her readers a sense of living in a Greek tragedy borne of the late 20th Century.  

With a title like Helen of Troy, 1993, it is unsurprising that this is a telling of Homer’s Iliad that we haven’t heard before. In an interview with the Alaska Quarterly Review, Zoccola addresses what she finds to be an “unfair ending” for the Queen of Sparta in the original, having no agency in the events that happen around her. It’s a bit of a paradox in the initial story: if Helen is the driving force behind the events of the Trojan War, why is she not the protagonist? Here, Helen takes center stage. In the town of Sparta, Tennessee, we learn of Helen’s family, their names appropriately disguised or shortened to match Helen’s deadpan, often sarcastic tone; for instance, her husband Menelaus is referred to as “The Big Cheese,” her daughter Hermoine is “The Kid,” and her lover Paris is “The Stranger.” Helen’s voice as we hear about her daily (mis)adventures is biting, sometimes humorous, and yet quietly tragic; while reading, it’s easy to get the feeling that we know this person, or someone just like her.  

The storyline of the collection draws inspiration from both Euripides’ tragedy Helen and Homer’s epic Iliad, even building from the original text of the latter—my personal favorite use of the original text includes a golden shovel within “helen of troy avoids her school reunion,” in which the last words of each line spell out the infamous lines: “bitch that I am, vicious, scheming” followed by Zoccola’s own enjambed last words: “horror to freeze the heart” (Iliad translated by Robert Fagles 6.408-409).  

Understatement and irony dominate Helen’s narration. Titles like “helen cleans up after the barbecue” and “another thing about the affair” both highlight the mundanity of everyday life and minimize the weight of her experiences; the choices Helen makes are hers, though an air of passivity casts a veil over the events that no doubt run emotions high. This is an interesting detail when read in tandem with how The Big Cheese treats Helen, encouraging her role as a housewife despite her claustrophobia and forbidding her access to the internet to keep her world small. Helen, conversely, pushes back at his attempts as she expresses pity, disappointment, and even hatred toward him. As we follow Helen’s life story, she finds herself married and with a young child. Though Helen possesses some agency in her circumstances, we see how generational poverty, trauma, and societal pressure to do what one is “supposed to” can stand in for fate. Zoccola channels this push and pull against greater forces symbolically with literal winds of change. Helen tells us as she returns on foot to Sparta, after running off with The Stranger, that the wind “scraped away shreds of [herself]/ back to [her], old stretches of skin that fit/ themselves to the holes [she’d] been guarding.” Later, in “helen of troy makes peace with the kudzu,” she gives us these words:  

“the world around me/ hunkered under the wrong spread of life,/ and yet i saw that it was living,/ edges softened, blanks filled in—a sphere/ that begged my absence, that collected/ my childhood in its outstretched hands/ and pushed it under the skin of itself,/ hidden and repurposed, folded away,/ breathing gently under combs of wind.” 

To provide context and add a layer of strangeness to the story, readers are given two more voices to contrast with Helen’s. For our Greek Chorus, the women of Sparta gossip among themselves. They inform us of such in “the spartan woman discuss the family”: “there are not ways of living. there’s one way/ out of the mud and one way back in, if you’re/ concerned about that sort of thing. we’re not/…we like/ to take attendance, unofficially,/ just a little whisper to share over coffee/ in the church hall”. In more abstract moments, we are also given a narrative from “The Swan.” Following the myth, it is not always clear if The Swan is an actual swan, Zeus in the form he took to impregnate Leda and conceive Helen, or both, or neither. This voice is from a distance—a bird’s-eye view, one might say—and gives a similar feeling of remove Helen senses from the community. An example from “(interlude: the swan describes an invasive species)”: “america killed her trumpeter swans, but she doesn’t love/ us, her mute replacements: so beautiful, so hungry, so vehement in/ defending ourselves. helen, i see you. hatched from an egg, paddling/ ever since. born in a land that doubts your claim to it.”  

Zoccola shows the big and small ways in which Helen’s life unravels in her retelling, with the authenticity of her voice as a Southern writer imbued with the mystical quality of early Classical Antiquity. Her empathy for her characters cuts through their cynicism and mystery, giving readers a modern, human portrait of larger-than-life literary figures. 

Helen of Troy, 1993 is published by Scribner Poetry and distributed through Simon & Schuster. Purchase information can be found here. 

Bios:

Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.

Allie Farrell is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, studying English with an emphasis in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies. She focuses on hauntings, history, and how the two intertwine. Allie is an Assistant Editor at The Cream City Review.

by LG Sebayan

Photo courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Press

Nathan Xavier Osorio’s award-winning debut poetry collection, Querida, looks at the lives of a family of immigrant origin in the San Fernando area of Los Angeles. Chosen by Shara McCallum as the winner of the 2024 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, this collection published in September by University of Pittsburgh Press as part of the Pitt Poetry Series explores the family’s place in the American landscape. Osorio shows how family, inheritance, memory, and transnational culture fill in spaces left by cracks in the terrain.

The forty-three poems of this rich, perceptive collection are divided into three sections and include a one-sentence first poem, “English as a Second Language,” poems that are sequences of sonnets titled “The Last Town Before the Mojave,” poems in the form of cantos, and persona poems. Except for its beginning poem, “Abandonarium,” the third section comprises poems with titles that start with the word “Ritual.”

Osorio examines themes of ancestry, the past, Americana, such as the game of baseball, and the American lives of immigrant parents and their children. “Querida” — the Spanish feminine word for “dear” and a term of endearment — not only serves as the title of the collection, but also appears in epigraphs of the book’s second section, and in “Querida América,” a poem in the second section made up of seven quatrains and one final stanza of five lines, which addresses America directly and delves into the speaker’s and speaker’s mother’s attitudes toward the United States. “Querida América, I remember your promise / and put my lips to the gas tank … Querida América, / the last train home has left” (61). The poem alludes to loneliness and unfulfilled dreams in a violent, capitalist, and an exploitative America.

A variety of divisions in America’s landscape can be found throughout the collection. For example, in the powerful opening poem, “English as a Second Language,” the speaker is separated linguistically from others in an educational institution: “in my collegiate days when I nodded submissively to a professor / who assured me my failure was because English was my second language” (5). Additionally, this poem and others feature the San Gabriel Mountains as a border and separation, while other poems refer to valleys, rivers, or earthquakes. More splits feature in the poem, “13 More American Landscapes, / a View-Master Reel,” which is made up of thirteen short-lined lyrical vignettes separated by one hyphen, including “The Liberty Bell’s fissure”; divorced, multicultural famous couple whose names are even separated in the poem’s lineation, “Lucille Ball and the Latin Lover, / Desi Arnaz”; and “The U.S.-Mexican border wall / puncturing the Pacific” (58). The breaks and barriers represent unrealized American ideals.

The collection’s final Section III, which consists of the “Abandonarium” and “Ritual” poems, plays with the multiple meanings of the word “extraction” — the extracting process, a thing extracted, and ancestry. Some “Ritual” poems seamlessly traverse languages from English to Spanish. The poem, “Ritual for Erasure,” repeats “This extraction site is an omission,” which calls attention to what is extracted, missing, and why; one response is: “This extraction site is an omission of that which could, yet still cannot: / the bruised phantom limbs and the prayer passed from mother to / son” (83). The extractions, such as the “phantom limbs” and mother’s prayer, suggest spirituals that have not yet manifested and absences stemming from lineage.

Querida’s American landscape is one of contrasts: “Hot Cheeto bags” juxtapose with “hand-stitched servilletas” (13), there are “pigeons / or palomas” (39), and “the barrio’s first and last organic grocery store” (87). Osorio mends gaps from disconnectedness with family relations, transnational markers, heritage, memories, and faith.

Osorio’s Querida is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Bios:

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the author of The Last Town Before the Mojave, selected by Oliver de la Paz for the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry, translations, and essays have been featured or are forthcoming in BOMB, the Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, Notre Dame Review, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and elsewhere. His writing and teaching have been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Foundation. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.

LG Sebayan is a PhD English and Creative Writing student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where her work was selected by Nicky Beer for the Creative Writing Faculty Legacy Award for Poetry. Her poems are published or forthcoming in CALYX Journal, Midwest Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Editor at Cream City Review.