Cut-up Poems from Tumblr
Witty, cutting, and poignant, missing e. is a collection of cut-up poetry which finds beauty in the digital mundane. Author Simone Parker pulls apart Tumblr users’ unique verbiage and twists it back together into insightful, moving, and often humorous poems which explore themes of romance, pop culture, queer youth, and growing up online in a shifting internet ecosystem. missing e. is unafraid to cut into the belly of the political environment of the last ten years, laying bare the rhetoric of censorship, political infighting, feminism and rising masculine extremism.
While the work often speaks to niche memes and events, each poem is rooted in a fundamental humanity which will ring true for native Tumblr users and internet neophytes alike.
Simone Parker’s missing e.: Cut-up Poems from Tumblr explores how sexuality, identity, and love shape both (and vice versa). She delves deep into the chaos, knowing full well “trust is a sin on the internet. / Our galaxy a social experiment.” Her scope seeks something larger than the human self, while not ignoring the power of desires within the interior, asking just how and why “[w]e are all yelling into bones and sand. Only a dead man offers eternity to the living.” Playful and contemplative, Parker does offer hope, though with all the work, patience, and understanding it requires of us.
Rosebud Ben-Oni, Alice James Award winning author of If This Is the Age We End Discovery
Simone Parker’s missing e. activates a landscape where the “digital mundane” meets a girlhood both collective and singular. Commingling the cut-up form popularized by Burroughs and revolutionized by feminist writers such as Dodie Bellamy with the collage-like and collaborative spirit of Tumblr, this collection achieves both a shimmering online polyvocality and a sharp autobiographical voice. Parker’s centos glide us through a user’s history of the platform: fandoms, nipple censorship, grave robbery, booping, 4chan, fake Scorsese films, etc., all the while forging new textures of queer self-writing. With the attention of an archivist, this aleatory poet and visual artist reblogs our own desires and affects. I emerged from this collection attuned to a kind of collecting that felt closer to expansive listening.
Emily Skillings, author of Fort Not and Tantrums in Air
A page-turning tribute to the golden age of Tumblr—infused with fresh depth and emotional clarity. The reader is transported into a three-dimensional world that feels both elevated and intimately familiar. This is a collection to keep under your pillow.
Christian Wheeler, author of Daydreams & Typewriter Smoke
Simone effortlessly captures the quirky nostalgia of Tumblr in a way that transports the reader back to simpler times.
Abby Magalee, author of Unstruck
Parker’s bold new collection of “cut-up poetry,” missing e., expertly repurposes the wild and proudly weird ecosystem of Tumblr to celebrate its contributors’ stark confessions, plaintive ruminations, deliciously bizarre non sequiturs, and occasional polemic. A longtime devotee to (and student of) the Tumblr community and its myriad interior corridors, Parker assembles for our enrichment—and makes exceptionally pretty—a communitywide investigation of modern life. Assembled as they are in missing e., no topic eludes Tumblr’s wide eye and fearless exploration: consumerism, feminism, celebrity culture, current events of the 2010s and onward, body image, mainstream media’s failings, nihilism, the madcap nature of our age, and (it can’t be helped) Tumblr itself.
Parker, in her unforgettable collage, deftly usher’s Tumblr’s passionate clamor from the sparkling underbelly of the internet and into missing e.—a new and very special work of art.
Zaq Baker, author of Unspectacular
In missing e., Parker explores the depths of Tumblr, a microcosm of the last fifteen years of the internet, as regulation, monetization, and censorship disrupt the grassroots tech optimism of the early 2010s and lead to the venture capitalist-funded cynicism of today, along the way making stops at highs and lows both personal and collective. This remarkable tapestry of a collection weaves a complex story of growing up online, intertwining niche discourse with global politics to expose in them the universal truths of ourselves and the homes we make on the internet.
Taylor Lorenz, national bestselling author of Extremely Online
Simone Parker
is a poet and collage artist. She is Jewish, bisexual, and unapologetically midwestern. She is the author of missing e. (Fernwood Press, 2025), a collection of cut-up poetry from Tumblr. Her work has appeared in wildscape, The Talking Stick, and bitter melon review, among others. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, her cat, and at least eighty-two house plants. Find her on Instagram @singedfingers or online at simoneparkerpoet.com