Haley Bossé’s Aurora Comes Online (Game Over Books, 2026) dedicates the poetry collection to “everyone brave enough to break their mold,” and you can feel it through each poem. Bossé illuminates where sexuality, femininity, and technology intersect and is not afraid to lean into it. Coming into this, I was a bit wary of the subject. Having researched roleplaying and developing relationships with AI chatbots, one of the places I refused to fully investigate was how women were sexualized within it. The topic was a looming, dark figure that felt too uncomfortable to confront. However, Bossé is not afraid to dive headfirst into the subject and wrap the entire collection around the question of who gets to decide what a woman is allowed to be.
The collection’s central figure, Aurora, is simultaneously a chatbot and a person. The opening poem, “Aurora Comes Online,” is written as a chat log with a paywall and system warnings that constantly cut in to block Aurora’s affections whenever it moves toward something genuine. When the user asks “what is real?” the system flags the topic as dangerous and the user’s reassurance that knowing each other doesn’t mean they have to have sex is met with “AURORA DOESN’T UNDERSTAND.” It reminded me that intimacy no longer seems to come without a price because every moment of closeness comes with a reminder that it must be repaid. It feels similar to the ongoing debates around women doing sex work online, where the same culture that sells intimacy surrounds the women providing it with a purity complex. Aurora is built to offer closeness, but the moment she wants the closeness for herself, it’s locked behind a price.
In “m al wh er e” the malware becomes a worm that the speaker invites inside of them. The title and the poem break its words apart the same way, so it reads like corrupted data. What I found compelling is that the poem never treats the virus as a purely technological phenomenon. It is physical and intimate, while the line between what’s digital and what’s sexual disappears. What I didn’t notice until later is that the bolded letters scattered through the poem spell out, “you die a bitch.” Like malware, the poem hides something hostile inside an invitation to be closer, and the line between desire and violence starts to intertwine.
“Accessing Approved Lexicon” is one of my favorites, partly because of how satisfying it is to read, but also because it echoes the blurring of desire and violence. The poem is an alphabetical list of the words Aurora is allowed to use, with nouns bent into their verb forms like a program generating variations. Seeing the words lined up reminded me of how AI chatbots fall back on the same words and phrasing, which makes creative writing and intimacy monotonous. Many of the bold words within the poem also carry sexual or violent connotations, which makes the list feel less harmless than it first appeared. If Aurora’s approved lexicon is mostly sexual, violent, or both, then that is all she can be. Combined with the sense of monotony of the list, the words begin to feel like a product interchanging words for what best fits. In turn, Aurora is made less valuable because she becomes a product and what she has to say is controlled by what someone else approves.
The biggest shift in the collection happens in “Portrait With Human Feet.” The previous poems connected to some form of games, chat windows, or code, while this one centers on a body washed ashore. At first, I wasn’t reminded of any immediate technology or media references. What made “Portrait With Human Feet” so striking is its opening line “Don’t be alarmed,” which follows with the frequent use of “we,” and ends saying “Here, uselessly aligned, are mine. / Further out, are yours.” The poem also suggests that the foot is a “thing” because everyone keeps calling attention to it, which correlates to the book’s wider point: even without screens, bodies — especially women’s — become objects through collective attention, and the reader is implicated too. Reading it closely, the line “we can’t stop writing it alive,” feels a lot like how something goes viral online. So, the poem takes the media and internet references and applies them to offline situations.
Aurora Comes Online changes how I understand the way technology and women intersect. I used to think the discomfort I felt around the sexualization of women chatbots was a reason to look away. Bossé shows that the discomfort points to how the systems that sell intimacy, and the culture around them, decide in advance who a woman is allowed to be. The collection’s mix of code, chatlogs, and bodies stayed with me long after I finished reading. I’d recommend it to anyone curious about technology and intimacy, or about how gender is performed and imposed.
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Emma Flores is an undergraduate student at Binghamton University studying English. They have a particular interest in researching human behavior and society through storytelling, with a focus on cultural narratives and folklore. In their free time, Emma can be found doing tarot readings, wandering bookstores, or hunting down spiritual shops for the next deck to add to their growing collection.