Shifting focus from the limits of the telescope to the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney’s second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early 60s, 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. The ultimate of limits, tackled by poetry of humour, intelligence and lucidity.The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with the boundaries of the cosmic and subatomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
Authors
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- C811/.6
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 22
- General Note
- Poems Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781552452172 9781770560901
- LCCN
- PR9199.4.T54
- LCCN Item number
- H39 2009eb
- Modifying agency
- DLC
- Original cataloging agency
- NLC
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (87 p)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)slc00223172 (OCoLC)549599831 (CaOOCEL)430351
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- NLC
Table of Contents
- TABLE OF CONTENTS 7
- GROUND CONTROL 12
- Whereabouts of a Couch Potato 13
- The Eclipse Chaser 14
- Apeirophobia 16
- Standard & Poor’s 17
- Theory of Everything 18
- Parelasiphobia 19
- Temperance St. 20
- Plosive & Fricative 21
- The Rocket Scientist 25
- Patent #A102520 27
- Brodmann Area 51 28
- The Astronaut 30
- ZUGZWANG 32
- Koinoniphobia 33
- Marooned in the Uncharted Regions 34
- Love Triangle 35
- Perpetual Motion Machine 37
- Post-Op between Morphine Shots 38
- The Prisoner’s Dilemma 39
- Heliotropism 41
- Alaskan Black Cod at the St. Lawrence Market 42
- Home Invasion 43
- Sound Bite 45
- The Chess Player 46
- BODY COUNT 54
- A Flash of Merriment 55
- Chronomentrophobia 56
- Breakfasting on the Sabbath 57
- Unweighting the Bow 59
- Looking Out for Number Two 60
- The Day the Sky Turned Pink 61
- Some Mornings I Am Both Dead 63
- Hotter Than the Hinges 64
- Admittance 65
- Aulophobia 66
- These 30 or 40 Years 67
- Optic Nerve 69
- THE NEWLY ENDURING 70
- Autobiography 71
- Age of Majority 72
- Sedna with the Long Black Hair 74
- XX 75
- Geliophobia 76
- Puddy Tat 77
- Nightingale 79
- Sound Bite Do-Over 80
- Case Files of the Newly Enduring 81
- Even Sitting I’m Moving 83
- Lutraphobia 84
- Theory of Something 85
- Acknowledgments 87
- About the Author 88
