Anthony Michael Morena is a writer from New York who lives in Tel Aviv. In 2015 he received his MA in creative writing from the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Flapperhouse, and Queen Mob's Tea House. He has also been a guest editor for The Ilanot Review and a regular reader for Gigantic Sequins, a good-looking, biannual, black and white literary arts journal. THE VOYAGER RECORD is his first book.
Anthony Michael Morena's THE VOYAGER RECORD is its own charming
exploratory device. Combining backstage stories about the creation
of the Voyager spacecraft's Golden Record (a touching dream of
cramming a musical and visual portrait of our planet onto a single
disk) and various imagined encounters with bemused or frightened
alien cultures out there, Morena reveals how best intentions can be
compromised, and how communication is subject to an infinitude of
possible miscues. This is a quietly profound and entertaining book.
PHILIP GRAHAM
In the 1970s, Voyager left Earth carrying a Golden Record meant to
represent human life to alien 'recipients.' At the same time, a
generation of children was also launched, into their own lives,
each carrying a record of human evolution--its possibilities, leaps
of faith, errors, and compromises--in the form of DNA. Anthony
Michael Morena's graceful ekphrastic essay THE VOYAGER RECORD brims
with the humility and hopefulness of these twin gestures, and
points at the way in which every inmate of our planet is also a
galactic Voyager. JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
Humans are odd, unpredictable, warlike--and often unintentionally
funny. Through the creation of his own Voyager Record--tracks laid
down and sent into space in the 1970s to introduce humanity to
potential aliens--Anthony Michael Morena both commemorates and
satirizes the original in this highly imaginative, poignant, and
entertaining book, melding personal and scientific, artistic and
philosophical. I'd send this out into the cosmos, no problem. TANIA
HERSHMAN
Like its subject, Morena's transmission is a celebration of human
achievement full of history, pop culture, jokes, and an intangible
soulfulness--enchanting and educational at once. PUBLISHERS
WEEKLY
Morena has produced a smart, hip, and profoundly fascinating
testament to both the unfathomable vastness of outer space and the
relentless attempts by human imagination to grasp it. BOOKLIST
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