Thirkield, Jonathan: Infinity Pool

University of Chicago Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 25, 2024

Publisher Marketing: "Jonathan Thirkield's Infinity Pool is a document of the shrinking distances between our hypermediated selves and the digital technologies from which our bodies are now all but indivisible. In their various lyrical, narrative, and formal mutations, these poems attest to the full spectrum of contemporary digital experience-from satellites crossing the edges of our solar system down to the cells and bytes that pulse invisibly beneath our perception. The poems of Infinity Pool are not about technology per se but are instead a reminder that writing itself is a technology with which we have the potential to reimagine the world. Diving headlong through the surface of our screens into dreams of infinite possibility and unknowable exposure, Thirkield's poems reach through the calamities of the last decade into what remains: the isolation of chronic illness, the perilous journeys of children growing before our eyes, the hope we can remain connected to each other despite the tenuous ties that bind us. Haunted by our vanishing place in a constantly transforming world, this collection imagines what becomes of the fragile human machinery by which we live and breathe"