"Mez Breeze embraces the medium of digital writing, producing highly original work with striking visual force. We were impressed by the diversity of her creative practice and her willingness to present daring writing in an accessible way. We think that writers like Mez are redefining contemporary poetry." - Judges for the 2015 Thiel Grant Award for Online Writing.

[On"Human Readable Messages"] "[A] classic...A sea of linguistic invention: unsurpassed technical innovation in terms of print language. Reading the various passages for the first time I felt I was privy to a new form of expression not merely a creole or amalgam, something really new. Mez is brilliant." - Michael J. Maguire

"This notion of source code as readable - as creating some outcome regardless of its machinic execution - underlies "codework" and other creative projects. The Internet artist Mez, for instance, has created a language called mezangelle that incorporates formal code and informal speech. Mez's poetry deliberately plays with programming syntax, producing language that cannot be executed, but nonetheless draws on the conventions of programming language to signify." - Wendy Chun, "Programmed Visions: Software and Memory".

I've never encountered any1 w the unique joy&delight in [s]language[s] as @netwurker @MezBreezeDesign #liquidpage #wordstorm14 #elit
— Mark C. Marino (@markcmarino) May 30, 2014

"Mezangelle seems to really take something *from* the code and bring it into speech, to recognize some element in a nevertheless masculinist programming language as feminist, as worth freeing from its context and allowing it to work in some other way..."

- Ebuswell, Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014.

"Claes Oldenburg has a sculpture in the form of a giant safety pin. It isn't a safety pin; it can't be operated like one. It's there to look at and to be part of the space around the viewer. The fact that it doesn't work is part of the design, not a defect. Mary Flanagan has a sculpture that is a giant joystick, and is a functioning joystick that allows people (ideally, more than one) to play Atari VCS games. It's supposed to work, by design; that's an essential part of the concept. So, it makes sense to me to imagine how Mez's codework or Oldenburg's safety pin would operate if they did work, but to me it is less reasonable and productive to actually try to engineer a working safety pin out of the existing sculpture or a working compiler for existing codework texts."

-Nick Montfort, Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014.

"Mez (aka Mary-Anne Breeze) ties experimental language to avatar creation and collaborative networking to explore complex and often contested political and social themes. The originality of her approach with its rich integration of the various aspects of her praxis has repercussions beyond aesthetics:

When Breeze transformed herself into Ms. Post Modernism, she felt obligated to represent that with a description of a physical act of self-mutilation: cutting out one's face so that it can be removed and replaced. Today, when Breeze posts to listservs, she posts under avatars that only exist for a few weeks or a few days, often reflecting a political or social issue on her mind, before she finally discards that avatar for a new one. The process of transforming her identity seems mundane and easy, just as it seems to anyone else who participates in these online environments long enough. (Reep)

Mez's precursors in print fiction include Kathy Acker, Among other works, Kathy Acker's Empire of the senseless. whose surreal and terrible prose seems to have been semantically dismantled by Mez's more technologically engaged praxis. Both stretch language and genre until only thin tendrils of reference to mainstream literature remain. These thin tendrils are even more nebulous in Mez's case, since she distributes her work, and indeed, shares "ownership" of her work, in ways that exist beyond the scope of the capitalist print fiction industry."

- "Language rules" by Geniwate, Electronic Book Review

"Based heavily in a Derridean universe of words within words, Mez Breeze's poetics works in an almost antithetical manner. Whereas Derrida and James Joyce operate fundamentally on a linguistics of implosion (or compression; portmanteaus and puns), Breeze operates by explosion. It is easy to dismiss her work as a pastiche on “l33t sp33k” but there is far more happening here than such a superficial read would avail a careful critic. By breaking words down into their principle parts, Mez operates on a principle of addition as opposed to subtraction...So instead of a linear read, you have a poetics which trains the reader to confront it with a sense of simultaneity. That is to say, these poems are often easier to read if you process them holistically (in this sense, to take them as a whole) rather than moving from a beginning to an end as you would with a typical English sentence...

Other various strategies she employs is the extensive use of code operators such as + and &. Brackets, braces, and parenthesis provide further elaboration. In essence, where Derrida and Joyce employed reduction, Mez employs expansion, and the effect (in my opinion) is not only brilliant, but exclusive to Mezangelle."

-Rollie Bollocks in "Mezangelle: A Reading Strategy". 

"Mez Breeze's new book is called "Human Readable Messages." So perhaps a distinction needs to be made between human-readable glitches and machine-readable glitches. Human-readable glitches are media glitches -- they occur when humans are communicating to humans through machines which mediate this communication. Human-readable glitches don't freak machines out. But neither do machine-readable glitches. Machine-readable glitches may crash machines, but that doesn't freak machines out, because machines have no sentient expectation of "normal." Machines lack the ability to have an uncanny experience. So to limit the discussion of glitches to events that only happen within machinic systems, glitches which never run on or involve human bodies, is to talk about something quite limited. Because a machine can't know or experience a glitch. Only a human can."

- Curt Cloninger, "glitch device/divide".

"In Mez's work, the digital poet combines code and language to create, what she calls, mezangelle. She uses mezangelle throughout her...hypertext pieces called Datableeding... Upon the entry of Datableeding one is faced with the option of going through the poetic journey in chronological order or starting with a number and theme...Starting with the Electroduction, the user is asked to type in a secret name and then the journey begins. This is where the user gets to see the mezangelle in action...A real test for the brain occurs once the user clicks on one of the hyperlinks inside the box of .THE CON.SOUL.E...the user is presented with a poetic set of words that disappear once the cursor is moved over a different name section and yet again the text is completely changed to reveal a different meaning. In next section Cloh!neing god N Angel-z the user is stimulated with audio and visual of images of angles being copied onto the screen as if being scanned by a copy machine."

- Keith Whittaker in Media Art Histories and Genealogies.

"I cannot help but to think of Netwurker Mez, whose primary coding language, Mezangelle, is used to create code-poetry that typically does not compile. The plethora of literary techniques invoked in Mezangelle make her work particularly accessible to people whose backgrounds tend to be less on the programming side of CCS. I like to think of her coding practices as closely related to obfuscation, though more in the literary sense than functional sense, if you subscribe to that dichotomy.

For non-coders who are intimidated by the second C in CCS, or anyone unfamiliar with Mez's work, I suggest testing the waters with some examples of interpretive readings that have been performed on Mez's code-poetry. Rita Raley has performed a very insightful reading on Mez's work. Another interesting reading of Mezangelle...can be found here."

-Max Feinstein, HASTACH Code Critiques CCS Forum

"In addition to the infiltration of the abbreviated language of email and text messaging into mainstream print media, it is now also commonplace to encounter programming keywords, symbols, operators, indentation, and pagination entwined with natural, non-technical, mother tongue expressions. Codework is the term associated with the literary and rhetorical practice of mixing human and computer languages (Hayles; Raley; Cramer). Types of codework span from intentionally arranged constructions intended for human consumption that do not execute on any real computer system, to valid expressions in bona fide programming languages that are meaningful to both human and machine readers. Examples of the former include the work of Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze)..."

-John Bork, University of Central Florida, "From Codework to Working Code: A Programmer's Approach to Digital Literacy".