Probably Inevitable

(Paperback)

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Winner of the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013)

These are high-energy poems, riddled with wit and legerdemain and jolted by the philosophy and science of time. "Time's not the market, it's the bustle; / not the price but worth," he writes, sailing through the rhythms and algorithms of a world made concrete by Samuel Johnson, before it was undone by Niels Bohr. Matthew Tierney's narrators grapple with the gap between what's seen and what's experienced, their minds tuned to one (probably) inevitable truth: the more I understand, the more I understand I'm alone.

If it were necessary to tell someone where I am,
I'd say the spheres of Kepler resonate like icicles.

I'd say I have loved.

Matthew Tierney is the author of the Trillium Awardnominated The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through the Morning Dark. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Reviews

"'It smothers us with normal,' Matthew Tierney writes in his spangled third collection, 'though we cleave to standard deviations.' Deviant, yes; normal and standard, no. These poems are all quantum fluctuation and collapse, language folding in on itself in the gorgeous vacuum of contemporary culture. 'Every p-brane sweeps out a (p+1)-dimensional world volume as it propagates through spacetime,' says Wikipedia. I have no idea what that means, but Matthew Tierney does. Let him school you." -- Michael Robbins, Alien vs. Predator "Tierney accomplishes certain Albert Goldbarthian feats, weaving whiz-bang with philosophical insights that will break your heart." -- American Literary Review "Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist." -- Eye Weekly

Author Bio

Matthew Tierney: Matthew Tierney is the author of The Hayflick Limit and Full Speed through Morning Dark and the recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award. He lives in Toronto.