Debut talent Raoul Fernandes’s first offering is Transmitter and Receiver, a masterful and carefully depicted exploration of one’s relationships with oneself, friends, memories, strangers and technology. The three parts of this collection are variations building on a theme-at times lonely, sometimes adoring, but always honest. Wider areas of contemplation-the difficulty of communication, the ever-changing symbolism of language and the nature of human interaction in the age of machines-are explored through colloquial scenes of the everyday: someone eats a burger in a car parked by the river ( Grand Theft Auto: Dead Pixels”), a song plays on the radio as a man contemplates suicide ( Car Game”), and a janitor works silently once everyone else has gone ( After Hours at the Centre For Dialogue”). Forthright and effortlessly lyrical, Fernandes builds each poem out of candor and insight, an addictive mix that reads like a favorite story and glitters with concealed meaning. Rather than drawing lines between isolation and connection, past and present, metaphor and reality, Transmitter and Receiver offers loneliness and longing hand-in-hand with affection and understanding: The last assembly instruction is always you reading this. A machine / that rarely functions, but could never without you.”