Signal Infinities
A Poem
Published on 20. August 2024
112 pages
978-0-7710-1400-0 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the DC Reid Poetry Prize • Longlisted for the 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry
Expansive and moving, Signal Infinities courses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits, in search of more enlivening, ethical relationships with each other and the earth.
In Signal Infinities a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention. Pain arrives. Collective and personal injuries and errors pile up. The glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing.
Unlike the Iliad's soldiers, the cast of youth in this long poem harbour traumas that are internal, hidden, unsung. Yet each wounded one flickers with defiance and dignity. So too the blue-collar winds, the little brown bats and roadside ferns who send out their urgent signals.
With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes, tonal shifts, chemical transmissions and streaming kinesics. It seeks an ethics that respects the body's imperfect intercom, its private coulees and unstable weathers, its sheer limits.
Amid too-little-too-late conditions, Signal Infinities floods with connections that are elemental, illuminating and wildly felt.
Expansive and moving, Signal Infinities courses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits, in search of more enlivening, ethical relationships with each other and the earth.
In Signal Infinities a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention. Pain arrives. Collective and personal injuries and errors pile up. The glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing.
Unlike the Iliad's soldiers, the cast of youth in this long poem harbour traumas that are internal, hidden, unsung. Yet each wounded one flickers with defiance and dignity. So too the blue-collar winds, the little brown bats and roadside ferns who send out their urgent signals.
With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes, tonal shifts, chemical transmissions and streaming kinesics. It seeks an ethics that respects the body's imperfect intercom, its private coulees and unstable weathers, its sheer limits.
Amid too-little-too-late conditions, Signal Infinities floods with connections that are elemental, illuminating and wildly felt.
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08/2024
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
€19.50
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MELANIE SIEBERT is the author of Deepwater Vee, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction book Heads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada and was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize. Melanie grew up in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan, raised as a white, third-generation settler of European/Mennonite heritage. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest on the beautiful homelands of the W̱SÁNEC Nations and the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Melanie practices attachment-focused and nature-based therapy in Victoria, BC.
