"The only thing that makes me happy is being at home, TV, films, books, music, Mac, drum kit, my musical montages, cutting-and-pasting chunks of old songs[.]" This sentence, originally conceived by Agustín Fernández Mallo for his novel Nocilla Lab, is the most honest Tinder bio I ever wrote. But the facts amount to dissimulation. Mallo's sentence accurately renders me; at the same time, its plagiarism separates me from my profile. Because the words defining me are not my own, are not really a part of me, I only feel their impact, effected or incurred, at a remove; my actual self regards my Tinder-self abstractly—the partial discernment of an object's texture while squelching it with a stick. Though hardly disguise-like, the Mall disguise eludes dating apps from feeling like an index of my good-for-no-one/good-for-someoneness. My bio was stolen, and the self-portrait is only incidental. And yet when someone matches with me, they know "the only thing that makes me happy is being at home, TV, films, books, music, Mac, drum kit, my musical montages, cutting-and-pasting chunks of old songs[.]"
     Without techniques of distance, dating apps begin to feel like one has uploaded themselves into digital synecdoche—an empty horizon as their extrapolated shape. Insubstantial. Fading through the ghosted space of pixels. Floating in half-life. Suspended, slash-like, between me/ontology until someone says "heyy :)." Their selfhood provided by right-swipes.
     In the internet's atopia of modern dating, the self-conscious construction of my Tinder-self as other keeps me from wandering into virtual delirium—misguided by mirages, waiting for horniness to thirst me to death. Love-groping through desolation like the poems in Human Tetris. Poems that are characters that are dating app bios: declaiming their kinks, needs, and desperation into the void.

I need someone sexy to blame for all the great things that are happening in my awesome life.

Run me a bath of hot chocolate; toast me like a marshmallow, burnt around the edges as my insides melt.

Me: Teacher (8th grade English), have the hots for all my students, looking for help in this      department…. This is not a crime. This is merely another sad exhibition.

     In Allen Grossman's essay "Hart Crane and Poetry: A Consideration of Crane's Intense Poetics with Reference to ‘The Return,'" he writes of Crane's poems as "[delegating] the reader the role of the exegetical participant." The reader is "internal to" the poem, and is assigned "the task of completing rather than deriving significances." This reading of Crane's poetry finds a stark, post-modern affinity in online dating. Dating app profiles purposefully constrain the person profiled—a few interests, a few pictures, an algorithmically limited song for an "anthem"—until that person is honed down to almost total incompletion. They are obscured, to use Grossman's word, from having a personality. Everything about them is a referent of their unsatisfied desires. Digital synecdoche.  Insinuating whoever's peering at their profile as the person who will complete them. Human Tetris, in a physical/typographical way, mimics this delusion that all desire requires is someone who can cohere the pieces.
     Written in falling text, every line is a headlong plunge towards the bottom of the page. The reader has to turn the book 90 degrees to the left, thus arranging the poems right-side horizontal. As vertical compositions, the lines look like props, like imitations of data—aquarial, a micro-parody of our ubiquitous, internet environment. By turning the book, the reader's hands are similar to the thumb of someone swiping for matches on Tinder / 3nder / Bumble / Grindr / Hornet / Gaper / Her et alia ad nauseam: each is beginning to actualize data (a gym selfie, GPU-farmed from the ether, becomes a messagable entity—a string of incoherent letters now offer comprehension). But matching only wrings some of the caul from a profile's digital nascence: the person matched with is still stuck behind a smartphone's fascia. They can type words, but they have no physical body to communicate with. A match is just a gesture towards actuality. Whereas the lay-out of Human Tetris implicates the reader as "internal to," and intimate with, the poem before the poem has even properly begun. The reader's hands craft the first enjambment. Eliding a misaligned text into poetry's form so that the words and the body are inseparably one. IRL.
     Unlike a dating app, designed for swipers to flex their potential as partners (though dating apps would fold if this was ever more than infrequently a flex), the readers of Human Tetris are an actual contingent of each poem's completion. They provide the poems their shape. They mentally kern the typos, like "that'   s it" and "that'   s me," intentionally placed throughout the text. The reader is each poem's formal—platonic—match. But that is not enough. The poems are still in agony. Because the reader is not their fantasy.
     Human Tetris has been described as "[seeking] not so much connection [or completion] as an understanding of the shape of desire." Having "connection," and my bracket crammed "completion," juxtaposed with "desire" is apt. Connection/completion remain rigid in nounness. In the context of Human Tetris, connections are ephemeral, put in place to disappear. "Cuddle me in my dreams; then let me cancel you." Or jury-rigged, oppressively stacked, overwhelming, and fatal. "You come as a friend; I keep you as a lover. You want to leave; I nail you to the wall." But desire is amorphous, shifting shape between noun and verb. Momentarily pin-downable, liable to slip away. "Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process" (Deleuze). In the poem, "A Love Affair For The Ages," Vi and Ali embarb love with the lines: "Let's intersect in the worst of ways, the best of deaths. Let's be twisted together, burn in that sweet-sweet agony. If you want a man for your dreams: that's me." The lover is a conduit for fantasy. Each person twists their separate desire through the unfulfilling other.  
     Are we all just fetishists of the impossible? Is the likelihood of an understanding relationship so bleak?Although Human Tetris seems to confirm these questions, it also, on a foundational level, refutes them. Vi Khi Nao and Ali Raz are both authors with remarkably individual voices. In Human Tetris, as one voice harmonizes with the other, we hear overtones and undertones that were not in their previous works. They have produced a distinct voice that is, nevertheless, still identifiable with each author. This collaborative achievement reminds me of what Sergei Eisenstein, writing in his essay on montage, "Word and Image," calls "the third something." That which can be abstracted from two separate elements placed in conjunction. The overtones and undertones of harmony. Eisenstein, preceding Deleuze, later elaborates by writing "the desired image [voice] is not fixed or ready-made, but arises—is born." The voice of two authors working in collaboration, writing poems for those of us who desire our desire to be born.