Rich and innovative, Do You Remember Being Born? is a novel about the uneasy relationship between art, artmakers, and AI.
-Camille-Yvette Welsch, Foreword
A timely work reminiscent of Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 (1995), Michaels' tale shows how AI can, paradoxically, stymie creation through its limitlessness and need for human guidance. This is also a compelling portrait of a tricorne-wearing poet famously dedicated to her craft.
-Alexander Moran, Booklist
Michaels merges modernist poetry with contemporary technology in this inventive outing . . . [Do You Remember Being Born? asks] probing and humane questions about what it means to be an artist.
-Publishers Weekly
This is a book about the choices we make: as poets, parents, people. At once a moving portrait of an artist and a brilliant exploration of the nature of consciousness, Do You Remember Being Born? invites readers to consider the various ways they navigate life under digital capitalism. Sean Michaels has carried the contemporary conversation around AI into a thoughtful new space, where 'one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.'
-Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book
Sparkling and kinetic, Do You Remember Being Born? has a deeply generous spirit and a beguiling protagonist, the kind I want to follow forever. A remarkable book about the difficulty-the profundity, too-of making art and making a life.
-Claire Luchette, author of Agatha of Little Neon
I couldn't stop reading Sean Michaels' timely, inventive, and remarkably tender novel. It evades simple binaries about art and technology to tell a story about families, legacies, and connection; most of all, it's a love letter to language itself.
-Alix Ohlin, Lambda Literary Award winner and author of We Want What We Want
Beautiful, wise, thought-provoking, and funny-Do You Remember Being Born? is the guiding light I have been waiting to follow through the confusion of what constitutes great art in these times. The answer? You are holding it in your hands.
-Ceridwen Dovey, author of Life After Truth
Could a novel be any timelier than Do You Remember Being Born? Wonderfully written, it makes you think, on every single page, of where it is we're going as a species.
-Douglas Coupland, author of Worst. Person. Ever.
One isn't sure whether Sean Michaels is a method actor or a magician. But a poet, he is not. And thank goodness, because here is a novelist of exacting candor whose gifts turn this book full of thorns about the chilling seduction of AI into a rich ride through what is imagined humane in art. You don't pull off a fiction like this so hitchlessly unless you truly understand how poetry and truth can coexist, even in a world that threatens both.
-Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst
