Multiversal
By Amy Catanzano
Selected by Michael Palmer
Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry
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.
Amy Catanzano's Multiversal is a complex shimmering meteroric / meteoric phenomenon, tended and tucked with seismic tremor, quantum folds, solar wingbeats, traversing all manner of particulars from blooming lotuses to Mandelbrot sunrises, from deep space to all-ocean worlds and quirky thorn-opals. What mischievous orbits, what jewelled delight: 'everything's a little brighter beyond the parameters.' The mind/poetry of this book is wondrous, strange, a polyvalent stimulant. I didn't think poetry could ever again be so beautiful. 'Between the eye and its rock star fractal / Straight into the future!' - Anne Waldman
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. – Michael Palmer