Infinity Pool - (Phoenix Poets) by Jonathan Thirkield (Paperback)

About the Book

"Jonathan Thirkield's Infinity Pool is a document of the shrinking distances between our hypermediated selves and the digital technologies from which our bodies are now all but indivisible. In their various lyrical, narrative, and formal mutations, these poems attest to the full spectrum of contemporary digital experience-from satellites crossing the edges of our solar system down to the cells and bytes that pulse invisibly beneath our perception. The poems of Infinity Pool are not about technology per se but are instead a reminder that writing itself is a technology with which we have the potential to reimagine the world. Diving headlong through the surface of our screens into dreams of infinite possibility and unknowable exposure, Thirkield's poems reach through the calamities of the last decade into what remains: the isolation of chronic illness, the perilous journeys of children growing before our eyes, the hope we can remain connected to each other despite the tenuous ties that bind us. Haunted by our vanishing place in a constantly transforming world, this collection imagines what becomes of the fragile human machinery by which we live and breathe"--

Book Synopsis

Moving through the realms of digital technologies, these poems cut to the core of our physical human experiences amid a virtually mediated world.

Diving through illusions and phantoms of virtual realms and into the human desire for boundless possibility, Infinity Pool charts the ways technologies have become embedded in our minds, bodies, and lives. Immersed in a world of data streams, neural nets, spider algorithms, and electronic terminals, Jonathan Thirkield's poems plumb the dissonances and shrinking distances between ourselves and digital technologies, imagining what becomes of the fragile machinery of the human body amid a rapidly transforming world.

Thirkield turns to language as a mediator and explores infinity as a mathematical concept, a multiverse conceit, and a driver of the computational imagination. Traveling across the full spectrum of digital experience--from satellites crossing the edges of our solar system to microscopic bytes that operate beneath our perception--this collection is a testament to the future we imagine ourselves to be living through and to what happens when our escapist desires give way to the realities of birth, loss, parenthood, and sickness.

Through lyrical, narrative, and formal mutations, these poems cut through a decade of exponential technological growth, landing in the reality of our corporeal experiences: the isolation of chronic illness, the daunting journeys of children growing up today, and the hope that we can remain connected to each other no matter how tenuous the ties.

Review Quotes

"Infinity Pool is at once completely contemporary and gorgeously lyric, possessed of a dynamic ability to practice the full range of strategies available to the poet. The title poem teems with embryonic stories, spinning through dreams and visions before orienting itself, tenderly and delicately, around a parent and a child. Infinity Pool sings a new pastoral in a technoscientific register, creating a lush poetic space full of fictions, images, stories, and characters that shape-shift as they resist and leave a sonic stain on the silence as they disappear. This artful, concise book of poems will surely make a significant contribution to contemporary American poetry."--Katie Peterson, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "Fog and Smoke"

"Infinity Pool oscillates wonderfully, offering narrations and meditations we think we can almost casually comprehend--along with language that challenges us to figure out entirely new ways to read. In powerful contrast to quotidian filter bubbles, Thirkield's poems turn inward and outward, immersing us while offering a view bounded only by the horizon."--Nick Montfort, author of "Narcissystem"

"Thirkield's poetry has been on my mind for twenty years now--ever since I was a graduate student. Reading Infinity Pool, I felt I was encountering a new way to do the lyric in English, as beautiful as the old ways but entirely its own."--Shane McCrae, author of "The Many Hundreds of the Scent"

About the Author

Jonathan Thirkield is a poet and digital artist. He is the author of The Waker's Corridor, winner of the 2008 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Conjunctions, and other journals. He teaches computational media and digital arts at Parsons, The New School, and Columbia University.