Search results for ""Author Matthew Tierney""

Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry! To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic -- how the mind contains both -- and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person? Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.

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Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks “glimpses of the obscure” to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic -- road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide -- or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems delight in aphorism, paradox, puns, and wit, each stanza a closure that moves tangentially to the next, each poem more bricolage than narrative, more shuffle than playlist. These are poems with no middle. These are poems of beginnings, and of ends.

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Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. "Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth," he writes, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Matthew Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's seen and what's experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I'm alone. If it were necessary to tell someone where I am, I'd say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles. I'd say I have loved. Matthew Tierney is the author of the Trillium Award--nominated The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

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Taking its title from lossless data compression algorithms, Lossless transmits through time and space those ‘stabs of self’ that intensify with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people. The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the book’s forty-eight sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of motes in the air, while chapters of Borgesian prose poems extract knowledge from information to reconstruct a subjectivity, a personality, and a life."Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity.” - Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his ''freefall of associative memory,'' where the past fl

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