In I Am Spam Larry O. Dean uses the subject lines of spam emails he has received to create the titles of his poems, and then writes poems to fit the sometimes random, sometimes unintentionally meaningful titles. This postmodern twist on the found poem results in a collection of funny, insightful poems that celebrate the blurry boundary between reality and fantasy—the absurdity of what people want to, and will, believe.

Considering the inherent mass-ness of spam emails, it’s not surprising that the titles of Dean’s poems look familiar—“Be Your Own Boss,” “I Ate Chocolate and Lost 20 Lbs,” “Modern Miracles Take Years off Your Face”—we’ve all seen these lines before. Yet how many of us take a moment to think what these messages really mean, and what sort of human tendencies they are intended to tap into? Dean explores these questions, sometimes seriously, as when he is pondering the ease of online adultery, and sometimes purely humorously, as in the bizarre concoctions he describes that might potentially take years off one’s face: “The blood of kittens / stolen from mobile homes / at the stroke of midnight, / boiled with frankincense / and Vitamin E supplements / applied as a mask / for one hour daily.”

Dean’s tongue, however, is always firmly in his cheek, and even the funniest of these poems has something to say about the excess and absurdity of our modern lives, where an email might be able to tell us if we’re an artist or not, and where, with more wealth than any nation in the history of the world has ever known, we are constantly looking for ways to “Stop Paying Too Much.” In this, the final and perhaps most comical of the poems, Dean provides the obvious answer to this dilemma: “Stop paying too much, / or simply stop paying. / See it; grab it; run. / Ignore alarms. Act / innocent, remembering / no one is. Ask / for your lawyer… Name your own price, / something nice, such as Fred.”

At first these poems may appear offhand or casual, but in reality they have something very important to say about the soundbites that threaten to define our lives. The concern is not so much that we are spam but that spam—like all media and advertising—is really just a reflection of us, our priorities, our concerns, our fears. Dean’s collection is therefore a clever capturing of something that in its own way tells a story of our society. One we usually delete without a second thought.