Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Five top books of poetry for sci-fi fans

At io9 Rebecca Ariel Porte came up with five of the best books of poetry for every kind of science fiction fan.

One title on her list:
Multiversal by Amy Catanzano (Fordham University Press 2009)

Representative lines: "Now that the future is unfolding all the time you are away. It will readily absorb the light. If the wavelength is slightly changed, then the atoms, then the light. It's the one falling in who sees the clock" ("The Book of Imaginary Planets" 3).

Working questions: What does a "quantum poetics" look like? If we assume we live in a multiverse rather than a universe, how, then, do we think about human experience—love, confusion, mortality—in light of that overwhelming fact? (Note that a book of poems is made up of many verses, a universe just one.) Poems with titles like "Notes on the Enclosure of Spheres" and "Clinamen Principium" think about the physics of celestial bodies and the physics of self through swift, elastic images. "The Barbelith Poems" invoke Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

For: Fans of Grant Morrison; Lewisian metaphysicians; lovers.
Read about another collection on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue