To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early 1960s, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, it sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. Shifting focus between the limits of the microscope and the limits of the telescope, Matthew Tierney gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe, one that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons,...
The book's poetic concerns with philosophy and time will make it a sort of poetic companino for people who enjoy books like Hawkings's A Brief History of Time.
Like the neutrino observatory of its title, <i>Midday at the Super-Kamiokande</i> seeks “glimpses of the obscure” to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic – road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide – or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems delight in aphorism, paradox, puns, and wit, each...
