←Recommendations of Until You Come Back to Me

I thankfully saw a wonderful online reading of this during lockdown and still find myself thinking about its tender absurdities. Carl has such a gift for nuance, whether its the spaces between how we communicate or how he animates onomatopoeia on the page, as if the script were a comic book. His writing becomes animated in how specific his choices are. But the most lasting image to me is the deceitful intimacy of our phones, how we supplant our IRL relationships with the false warmth of an inanimate device. It may feel real, but it is anything but.

A sharply funny (hilarious even!) look into a fully realized future where technological dependence has taken on a new meaning. I love the theatrical conceit of phones being realized as humans and gaining sentience. It provides a direct but never overdone metaphor for the distinctly oxymoronic ways technology has changed/improved/ruined our lives--connected and detached people from one another, diluted and distorted information hunting while making us reliant on it...Zita's journey manages to be hilarious, cringeworthy at times, and a poignant exploration of someone trying to hold onto humanity and connection in a world sometimes preventing that.

By taking us into a darkly comic future that could be years away or just around the corner, Holder brings our relationship with technology to its amatory – and possibly inevitable – extreme. In doing so, he turns one woman's journey to replace her old phone into a search for meaningful connection, as well as an examintion of how people can manipulate their connections into meaning. It's a story that's funny, disturbing and heartfelt all at once.

The terrifying power our phones have taken on our way of functioning and our identity is expertly communicated. Fantastic!