Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry
**Winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize
**
Multiversal, the second book by Amy Catanzano proposing a theory of
quantum poetics, invites readers to explore the intersections between
language, nature, science, and consciousness. Multiversal takes its name
from the "multiverse," a science fiction concept that has become an
accepted theory in physics. It suggests that reality comprises multiple
dimensions in space and time. In form and content, this collection takes
novel approaches to the materiality of language itself, to the spacetime
of poems.
From the Foreword by Michael Palmer:
Amy Catanzano offers us a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple
forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity and an open space that
is motile and multidimensional. The work exists at once in a future-past
and in a variety of temporal modes. At one moment the scale is intimate,
at another infinite. She interrogates our means of observation and
measurement (the telescope, the ice-core), our mappings, our cosmic
calculations, our assumptions about cause and effect. In the background,
"there is a war being fought," though which of many wars--cultural,
scientific, military--we are not told. In a time of displacement such as
ours, she seems to say, in place of "universals" we must imagine
"multiversals," in place of the fixed, the metamorphic. As much as the
frame may be cosmic (micro- or macro-), it is important to remember that
the work serves the vital questions of the hereand-now, "the flowering
of the world," the corrosiveness of violence, the primacy of desire, the
necessity of wonder. Multiversal represents an effort to see things as
they are through an act of poetic reimagining, that is, to see variously
within the folds and fields of the actual, where the physis, or life
force, resides.
