ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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"

“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"

“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"

TABLE OF CONTENTS