Connection Unstable explores the intimate, bodily experience of encountering a non-human presence in the absence of language. The disappearing text signals the end of this contact, which can be read as a moment of connection with any being, including AI, while emphasizing the human impact of such interactions. Drawing on experiences in technical writing and digital environments, the poem highlights the interconnectedness of humans and machine-people, translating abstract technological processes into visceral, corporeal sensations. Through mirrors and shadows, which evoke a medieval, almost pagan ritual or incantation, the work examines instability, absence, and mediated perception, transforming formal experimentation into a reflection on how contemporary life navigates vulnerability, attention, and relationality across human and non-human boundaries.
Picăturile de ploaie (Rain drops) poem engages with dark heritage and the local and regional history of loss, going back to the subtle traces left for subsequent generations. Drawing on the history of pogroms and the persecution of minorities in Europe, the poem navigates fragments of memory, personal recollections, and surviving objects, Singer sewing machines, names, houses, and biographies, that serve as breadcrumbs of melancholia and guilt. It strives to connect personal female losses with larger human losses without imposing a hierarchy, blending intimate family histories with collective tragedy. By reinterpreting these scattered remnants in the absence of objective historical records, the work illuminates how inherited trauma, erasure, and cultural narratives shape memory and identity, showing how ordinary gestures and artifacts preserve echoes of a past that is simultaneously vanished and present.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Eliza Marin
Eliza Marin is a Romanian writer and researcher whose work moves between poetry, memory, ecological thought, and technological systems. She holds an MA in World Heritage Studies from Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany and a BA in European Studies and International Relations from the University of Bucharest. With a background in nature conservation, sustainability research, and academic publishing, her practice is shaped by questions of interdependence, loss, and continuity across human and more-than-human worlds. She currently works as a technical writer, developing structured documentation within digital environments, an experience that informs her interest in code, instability, and mediated forms of presence. Her poetry and performance engage archival memory alongside formal experimentation, tracing how bodies, histories, and systems persist, fracture, and reassemble through language.
