Amy Catanzano Multiversal Fordham UP.jpg

Amy Catanzano offers us a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity and an open space that is motile and multidimensional. The work exists at once in a future-past and in a variety of temporal modes. At one moment the scale is intimate, at another infinite. She interrogates our means of observation and measurement (the telescope, the ice-core), our mappings, our cosmic calculations, our assumptions about cause and effect. In the background, there is “a war being fought,” though which of many wars, cultural, scientific, military, we are not told….As much as the frame may be cosmic (micro- or macro-), it is important to remember that the work serves the vital questions of the here-and-now, ‘the flowering of the world,’ the corrosiveness of violence, the primacy of desire, the necessity of wonder…”

—Michael Palmer, from the Foreword

 

“Amy Catanzano's Multiversal is a complex shimmering meteroric / meteoric phenomenon, tended and tucked with seismic tremor, quantum folds, solar wingbeats, traversing all manner of particulars from blooming lotuses to Mandelbrot sunrises, from deep space to all-ocean worlds and quirky thorn-opals. What mischievous orbits, what jewelled delight: 'everything's a little brighter beyond the parameters.' The mind/poetry of this book is wondrous, strange, a polyvalent stimulant. I didn't think poetry could ever again be so beautiful. 'Between the eye and its rock star fractal / Straight into the future!'"


—Anne Waldman

“Multiversal represents an effort to see things as they are through an act of poetic reimagining, that is, to see variously within the folds and fields of the actual, where the physis, or life force, resides.”


—Michael Palmer

 
 
 
 

“Amy Catanzano’s Multiversal presses the desire to measure against the refusal to map, simultaneously conflating and calibrating an unfolded and flowering multidimensional present. Catanzano maneuvers through embrasures and enclosures, conceptual strata and human dream, in an effort to ‘narrate the code’ of this opened space ‘Since only by way of counterpoint can [she] build an invention to measure the behavior of everything clockwise.’ Narration, however, may be an oversimplification. The language sings and branches, blooming sonic roses and luminous thought. This is not science, since the results cannot be replicated. Instead, Multiversal is philosophy at its highest order, poetic vision in the service of a greater accuracy, a ‘quiet machine’ with incredible force.”


—PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry

Award Citation by Judges Seido Ray Ronci, Robyn Schiff, and Richard Siken