Amy Catanzano, Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella. Noemi Press, 2014.

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Winner of the 2012 Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction. "Amy Catanzano's 'neo-scientific' novella is a metafictional tour de force: a tour of the forces that compose the cosmos, a recomposition of the music of the spheres. Here, narrative flow becomes a kind of quantum fluid, bifurcating into character systems and poetry. Tinctures of the inhuman spread through this writing, causing language to convulse in forms as vivid and varied as the multiverse itself. Alternately explosive and meditative, at once lyrical and conceptual, Catanzano's work renews the pataphysical claim of literature on science. In this work, American literature has found its own Jarry."—Andrew Joron

"Amy Catanzano's writing is a vector, releasing sparks. To read her work is to emit/receive—something. From a distant yet intimate point. What will happen next? Where will you go? This novella is a guide-book to a future that has not arrived yet. To 'predicate.' To 'devolve.' To 'shimmer.' In a book that is a like a nerve."—Bhanu Kapil


The Amulet
This is a visible language or a war against people’s values. My aim is to become incomprehensible to the machines. The large hadron collider is the first accepted vessel of time. If we could see language it would be a kind of extracted telepathy. I live in a complex visual environment around my neck. With the convergent evolution of eyes of different animals. Physically I become my meaning; as an observer, you subvert the surface of the book. I am capable of visual communication like your dream in deep water. Its phosphorescence gives me shape. The expelled cloud of ink shields my private thought. We now make visibly held syntaxes. We are no longer reading but seeing with eyes you’ve just developed. All of my fixed encounters take place in a 17-mile tunnel underground. Photons collide to recreate the universe right after the Big Bang. We call it a mini Big Bang because we communicate in code. This is our first contribution as new machines.

Amy Catanzano: Four Poems toward a Quantum Poetics
QUANTUM POETICS: jacket2.org/commentary/amy-catanzano



AMY CATANZANO is the author of three books: Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press, 2014), recipient of the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction; Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009), selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize and recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry; and iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Editions, 2008). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught for many years in Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is an Assistant Professor and serves as Director of the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

An e-chapbook,the heartbeat is a fractal, was released by Toronto/Tokyo-based Ahadada Books in 2009. Her speculative essays on the intersections of poetry, science, and pataphysics have been published in Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics, and a collaborative discussion project on poetry and science in which she participated appears in Jacket2. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she is an Assistant Professor of English and serves as Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.