Sometimes books of poetry have inscrutable titles that don’t tell us much about the collection. Not true of Anne Cecelia Holmes’s The Jitters. These poems jitter. They rattle. They vibrate, uneasily, like they’ll fall apart if a nut or a bolt comes loose. Holmes’s portrays the human organism, the human brain, and the human soul as a loose network of mechanistic parts threatening to disassemble itself because…well, it has the jitters.

The human machine is capable of “drilling a path through a canyon just to be productive.” “Brains are made to be mapped,” she writes, and in another poem: “When I don’t know what/ to do I place your brain/ in a vat. I program it….” Elsewhere: “My head is a machine you can touch.” These machine-bodies are everywhere and they constitute reality, like Hamlet’s “words”:

Bodies bodies bodies. This is how
the world looks. We can raise every glass
or just keep screaming. On the roof we feel
most of the thunderclap, our organs buzzing
for the new year…

But we’re also part-organism with a parasitic spirit: “Take your body and plant it in the lawn,” she writes, and before that she advises that “the ghost doesn’t want in, it wants something to eat.” The ghost (the soul? spirit and ghost are essentially the same word with different etymologies) is an invader, a virus (a computer virus?), rather than the essence of human individuality. If the soul takes up residence, it’s in “the place in your stomach where/ the light flickers. A felt ghost/ here I am, dissolving above.”

Within our mechanistic existence, we won’t find much solace in companionship. Too many machines too close together and their wires get crossed, they short circuit: “We don’t want to be too accompanied, too much of an electrical fire.”

In the poem entitled “Total Potential Hazard,” Holmes plays on the verbs “screw” and “spring” and “sew” to remind us of Frankenstein-like construction. We “travel by assembly line.” When the universe confronts us, when “the whole/ galaxy says hello,” it seems annoyed by our presence and interrogates us: “who are you? Why can’t you leave us alone?” Elsewhere: “It’s like I’m a real person/ in this strange empty/ animal universe….” I’m reminded of the Modest Mouse lyric, when the universe speaks to humankind: “We’re not sure where you stand/ you ain’t machines and you ain’t land/ And the plants and the animals, they are linked/ And the plants and the animals eat each other.”

But don’t forget: we’re also part-organic. In “Total Potential Hazard,” Holmes reminds us that we have tongues, that we “chew” and “creep.” We blush, we rot, we’re capable of being wounded, capable of “sucking on a stone.” But somewhere along the line, the inorganic has overtaken the organism: memories are made of bricks. Our insides buzz. “Our hearts/ need a better structure.” “Your chest is a switch you have yet to touch.” “I keep shouting, ‘I am not a robot! Please feed my spirit!’ but you know how that ends.” Again, in “Total Potential Hazard,” we feel our distance from the organic world: “Outside it’s like a pile/ of life no one is sorting out.” We’re haphazardly and lazily made, not fully machine but not fully organism. And we’re not as synthesized and sleek as a cyborg. We’re poorly constructed. We’re shaking and rattling and jittering.

I don’t want you to think, however, that Holmes is pessimistic about our condition...even if “anxiety is a history baked in my guts” (one of the best descriptions of anxiety I’ve ever read). In fact, most of “The Jitters” feels a little…celebratory. It’s painful to be us, but our bodies are wondrous: they’re just made of building blocks, that’s all. Echoing Whitman, Holmes writes, “I’m singing a medley for these molecules I have.” We’re all in the same rusted condition, and we should respect each other for that: “Here in this dust bowl I salute you.”