The Living Dead Woman Sonnets
by Brenda Mann Hammack

Introduction: The Living Dead Woman is uncanny as any human, familiar enough to do her shopping by daylight, strange enough to merit suspicion for never seeming the same age from one day to the next.
She’s certainly not a perky young thing. Some part of her is always dying, and she hasn’t the time to mourn skin cells or memory lapses. Sure, she’s expected to be set in her ways, but hers were never anyone else’s ways.
She’s tipsy with inspiration. Someone is bound to complain. The Living Dead Woman is more familiar with mycelial threads than with social media, but she’s learning.

“The Living Dead Woman Sonnets” explore the shifting tectonics of identity and artistry in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
While the words are written without AI assistance, the punctuation is influenced by text-to-image prompt writing. In the poems, the double colons operate as caesuras, identifying breath beats or thought breaks. In Midjourney, the double colon instructs the bot-collaborator to consider each segment separately rather than blending elements within a segment.
I use the poems as generative prompts, varying wording during successive renderings. I can add numerical values to serve as guides as well. Each image involves significant blending and reworking within the frame. I can zoom out or pan to add more to a scene. I can also highlight regions to add details or eliminate them.
With the current version of Midjourney (v. 6), I have more input in the digital result than I do when I’m working with my DSLR camera, though I do use other photography apps in post-production, when necessary. Since I have been working with some variation of this character since January of 2023, I have hundreds of images I can use as character or style references to help me to maintain some consistency — even if the living dead woman is prone to chronological changeability.

Contents

The Living Dead Woman Is Not Averse to Anachronism
The Living Dead Woman Has Roots
The Living Dead Woman Discovers “Quoz”
The Living Dead Woman Feels Worm
The Living Dead Woman Is Not Afraid of Encryption
The Living Dead Woman Has No Plans for Crossing
The Living Dead Woman Gives into the Welter

Brenda Mann Hammack teaches digital storytelling, creative writing, folklore, and women’s literature at Fayetteville State University where she also serves as coordinator for the concentration in creative and professional writing. She is managing editor of Glint Literary Journal.

The Living Dead Woman Sonnets by Brenda Mann Hammack

The Living Dead Woman Sonnets
by Brenda Mann Hammack