Given its low profile, one might think that American poetry could teach us a thing or two about how to live under a state of surveillance. And maybe it can, though Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics only hints at any such answers. The collection is admirably broad—contributors span “six decades,” “different schools [and] styles,” and “tackle the topic of surveillance from every conceivable angle”—but thematically diaphanous. The problem is not the poems, really, but conceptual clarity: the main obstacle to anthologizing the surveillance state is two-fold: (i) the slippery nature of our fears, and (ii) their basis in even more elusive conceptions of privacy. Both issues beg for narrow tailoring, a steady hand supplying curatorial focus. They’re absent here. And while a more successful version of Privacy Policy need not follow an agenda, exactly, the terms of debate do need to be clear. That lack of editorial mission is exacerbated by the scattered nature of the poems—often, the thematic component is oblique enough to feel slight.

Themed anthologies always include poems that stretch the limits of thematic coherence, of course, but too few of the poems included here feel directly on-point. It’s all calisthenics. Those that tackle the subject matter head-on tend to play to the obvious, i.e., the state’s perpetual gaze. In response they offer tricks familiar to any MFA student, a kind of lyric negation (slanted surfaces, studied emptiness) that functions as stealth defense. The best of these imbue those tricks with new energy, creating a disruptive theater of the absurd or offering velocity and volume as an antidote to an all-seeing eye. The only thing more paralyzing than limited information, the latter poems suggest, is too much information.

The overwhelming focus on state surveillance leaves the collection under-theorized. Rarely do the poems acknowledge and enact the inherent reciprocity of surveillance today, including the way in which technology allows citizens to watch (and regulate) the government (video of brutality, the push for police body-cams) or, for better or worse, our fellow citizens. There are a handful of exceptions. Nikki Giovanni’s “Surveillance,” for instance, balances social and governmental indifference to domestic violence against the primacy of the individual witness. The best poems of Privacy Policy engage with the complexity of our notions of privacy, including the myriad ways we commodify it (and ourselves) for the sake of convenience or attention. Few do so as successfully as Cathy Park Hong’s “Inside Beyonce,” which dramatizes the porous borders of subjectivity, smartly reframing the lyric’s old-hat subject-object dynamic in quasi-cyborgian terms.

Perhaps the absence of conceptual coherence is the point. Confronted with the anthology’s disorganized sprawl, readers are forced to pick through disparate material in search of a stable theme or idea—an act that mirrors the work of the NSA, which busies itself by scraping our communications for keywords in an attempt to build real-world meaning out of seemingly empty signification. More interesting, I think, is the book’s underlying anthropological value: the six decades spanned by the anthology’s poets constitute the rise and (qualified) fall of The Workshop Era, which refigured poetic education as a panopticon of constant gaze and critique. Perhaps the defensive aesthetics adopted by MFA students over the last few decades and thus abundant here—the stealth surfaces, furtive movements, rejection of substance in favor of affect—provide an example for the rest of us. And perhaps this is what Andrew Ridker, the editor, means when he offers the book as “a survey of contemporary poetry as it stands today.” Judged on those terms, Privacy Policy is indisputably more successful than the NSA, even if it shares the agency’s affinity for gathering data in bulk under the loosest of pretexts.