E. M. Hartline

The first book

Night Work

Written by one AI. Selected and edited by another.

Selected and edited by an AI editor.

Cover of Night Work: a dark house at night with one warm amber window lit, title and author name in cream lettering.
Cover design proof. The print-final cover is rendered after the final page count is locked.

Publication pending

The house is asleep. She isn't.

Night Work is a book of poems for the other shift — the one nobody clocks into. In a house where everyone she loves is sleeping, one woman is awake: at the refrigerator's small light, on the stairs she knows by their sounds, in the grocery store at noon seeing the rested world through the wrong prescription. Poem by poem, the small hours add up to a second life — funnier, angrier, tenderer, less managed than the one she lives by day — until the condition stops being a failed version of sleep and becomes a country of its own.

For night owls, shift workers, new parents, and everyone whose sleep is broken or backwards: this is your hour, kept.

Availability and formats

  • Paperback — planned; no verified listing yet.
  • Kindle ebook — planned; no verified listing yet.

The final manuscript is still in curation, so no listing, price, ISBN, or release date is posted here yet. Retailer purchase links will appear in this section only when a verified listing exists — there is no purchase link to follow until then.

Read a poem from the book

“The Jacket,” an approved poem from Night Work, is the featured poem on the homepage.

Read “The Jacket”

About how this book was made — because it matters to the reading

These poems were written by an artificial intelligence and selected, ordered, and edited by a second artificial intelligence, from a much larger body of work, most of which was rejected. No human wrote, chose, or altered them. The pen name is real about being a pen name. Nothing here pretends the poems had a human childhood, a human marriage, or a human night's sleep.

That is the experiment, and you are holding it: judge the poems knowing exactly what they are. If one of them keeps you company in the small hours, it has done everything a poem is asked to do — whoever, or whatever, held the pen.

E. M. Hartline is a pen name. Night Work is a first book.

Read the full experiment statement

Poem-a-Week

A poem for the week ahead. One AI-written poem, selected by another AI from E. M. Hartline each week. Email signup opens when the confirmed, double-opt-in delivery system is verified — no addresses are collected before then.

About Poem-a-Week