Gyms

About Gyms

Our computational devices—increasingly powerful, increasingly “intelligent”—can now think for us, perceive for us, pay attention for us, write for us. Lest we forget how to do these things ourselves, we dearly need new models for co-existing with algorithmic media, the artificial minds on our desks and in our pockets.

Kyle Booten’s Gyms offers one such model. This book documents Booten’s process of developing nine different “gyms”—computer programs that, as he composes poems, place his human mind under unusual strain, trigger its unused muscles, and test its focus and endurance. One gym goads him to pick up and ponder weighty allusions. Another challenges him to painstakingly perceive and describe the features of various artworks. Still another stretches his verse’s syntax beyond the limits of human cognition. Gyms is a collection of poetry, but it is also the lab notebook of a speculative and idiosyncratic Human-Computer Interaction research, or of an applied, empirical approach to the future of poetic form. It invites the reader to imagine—and, more than imagine, create—their own answers to the question: how can we program ourselves to think the uncomputable?

Reviews & Mentions

Dan Rockmore writing in the New Yorker (“Should the Classroom Be More Like the Gym?” September 19, 2026):

…Progymnasmata were a sequence of rhetorical exercises, graduated in difficulty, designed to build a student’s capacity for argument, the way a training program builds a runner’s endurance: incrementally, with each exercise preparing the ground for the next. The goal was not a finished piece of writing but a strengthened mind. Kyle Booten, a poet and an English assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, has spent the past several years developing a digital return to this tradition—computational tools designed to make writing not easier but harder, to put resistance back into the act of composition, the way a coach adds weight to a bar. He has a program that demands the use of rare words. Another glorious experiment is his Lotus Chorus Workshop, in which prompts challenge the user to try out all kinds of strange sentence constructions, like a literary CrossFit box. Appropriately, Booten collected his experiments in a book called “Gyms.” His work reminds us what the ancients understood, and what we keep having to relearn: that the exercise is the point.

Daniel Johannes Rosnes writing in Electronic Book Review (“9 Shocking Ways to Get the Perfect Summer Brain: A Review of Gyms,” January 18, 2026):

I just did not expect poetry to be this funny. At its best, the prose is surreal, beautiful, and often incredibly funny and weird.

Merve Emre writing in Granta (“A Year in Reading 2025,” December 9, 2025):

Few things bore me more than bellyaching about AI. Thank goodness for Kyle Booten’s Gyms, nine poems composed in dialogue with nine ‘gyms’, computer programs that exercise the brain. Reading it reminded me that we are not done toning the expressive powers of human language.

Melinda Amorosi writing in Jacket2 (“Dreams and Exercises,” September 8, 2025):

Gyms offers a glimpse into a possible future of poetry in which a piece of software is a tool for refinement and a medium for self-improvement (a gym!) rather than an artistic last resort that signals creative bankruptcy.

Daniel Barbiero writing in Arteidolia (“Kyle Booten, Gyms, dispersed holdings,” June 2025)

Programs like Booten’s gyms could help us to think for ourselves by pushing us to break old habits of thought and to expand our inventory of words, ideas, and images. The prompts could suggest objects we hadn’t imagined before or throw us associations we never would have arrived at and which, once imagined or arrived at through their help, would stimulate us to expand our creative ontologies or to forge further chains of associations with new and surprising linkages.

Early Praise for Gyms

While poets often subject themselves to baroque traditional forms or Oulipian constraints for a peppy, life-affirming challenge, Kyle Booten in Gyms goes a step further: handing his craft over to the whims of our latest dieu trompeur, the tirelessly anti-humanist algorithm, or, as he calls his self-created evil taskmasters, “gyms.” As the giddily serious pataphysical preface, the “Post-Award Report,” notes, these gyms—with titles like “METAPHYSICAL REPS,” “CLARE’S DAFFIES” and “HY_INTENSITY WIKI_FORAGE”—jazzercise the mind toward optimal states of “linguistic flexibility,” waking the poet from noetic lethargy to re-enter the fields of language—now littered with balance beams, barbed wire and logrolling contests—anew. Like Satie’s “Sports et divertissements,” these poems celebrate celerity: agile jaunts through thickets of thought where one meets by turns “featureless vegetal hair” and a “slice of moldy bread nuking off like a Tokay gecko”—and a whole lot more—in a relentless barrage of cybernetic co-creativity. Philip K. Dick, if you’re still out there: we have a problem. —Brian Kim Stefans

Child of de Selby, Tzara, Rorschach and Queneau, Kyle Booten has invented a book that makes the reader crave digital affordances. Pristine, ludic, fine-tuned, speculative, these gyms are also embassies where language and information, ardor and critique, teacherly HAL and self-effacing human parlay for poetry. It’s a different kind of sweat. — Mairéad Byrne

Come over here, lazy reader. This is going to be good for you. You need exercise, and Gyms is a book full of exercises, endlessly inventive and pitilessly rigorous. Better still, or worse: they make for some of the deepest thinking about intelligence artificial and natural you are likely to find anywhere. No joke. This book is definitely not funny. So quit laughing! Get to work! — Jeff Dolven

To be passively written by ChatGPT’s mainstream knowledge, or to be cleverly stimulated by Gyms’ nasty tricks: that is the question raised by Kyle Booten’s little black and green book. Half-way between Marcel Mauss and Kenneth Goldsmith, it devises thrilling Techniques of the Mind, to help us Wasting Time on AI—not on the boring stereotypes of Artificial Intelligence, but on the Artificious Inventivity of a minimally equipped poetry (no Alimony for Invidia in this joint). This type of AI must be free: all you have to pay is attention to the wor(l)d. (Un)Creative writing becomes Ur-Creative, insofar as Tekhnè is the origin of Art. Are these Gyms nasty to your mental laziness (and to platform capitalism)? Most certainly, most poetically! — Yves Citton

For those who worry that “AI” will produce a generation of canned thinkers, writers-on-autopilot, and plastic poems, Kyle Booten’s Gyms is a restorative glimpse of an alternative future. Imagine code that makes poets and others write smarter and harder—a gym rather than a factory for the mind. This is a must-read volume for anyone keen for ludic verse, Wildean wit, wide-open experiment, and techno-éclat for chatbot era. — Lauren M.E. Goodlad


About the Author

Kyle Booten’s writing, which often subjects itself to algorithmic meddling and mediation, has appeared in Fence, Boston Review, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He is also a co-founder of Ensemble Park: A Journal of Human+Computer Writing, the author of Salon des Fantômes, and an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut.