B.J. Best: the poetry of video games
Video games are everywhere you look. For example, one of the most talked-about TV shows this year is The Last of Us, which is based on a video game. (And yes, we understand that this is not exactly news, but hey, we’re book people.) This year’s panel Ready Player One examines how writers and poets have embraced and addressed this ever-growing phenomenon.
The color, noise, and often cryptic images of classic video games set the prose poems in B.J. Best’s collection But Our Princess Is In Another Castle in motion, but the poems soar far beyond their nostalgic springboards. And while Mario and Pac-Man populate these pixelated landscapes, this book translates the games and plays them in the real world. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, the book explores how our past virtual lives can inform our present actual ones. A coming-of-age narrative turned love story turned philosophical journey, But Our Princess Is in Another Castle deftly combines two mediums into vivid poems as lyrical as they are imaginative.
B.J. Best is the author of seven collections of poetry, including But Our Princess Is in Another Castle (Rose Metal Press, 2013), a collection of prose poems inspired by classic video games. His game Space Cactus Canyon (2017) for the Atari 2600 is available in physical format from AtariAge. In 2021, his story And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One won the annual Interactive Fiction Competition.
