The Polymers

The Polymers is a bold and brilliant new work from one of our most ambitious poetic minds. Structured as an imaginary science project, the varied pieces in this collection investigate the intersection of poetry and chemicals, specifically plastics, attempting to understand their essential role in culture. Through various procedures, constraints, and formal mutations, the poems express the repeating structures fundamental to plastic molecules as they appear in cultural and linguistic behaviours such as arguments, anxieties, and trends. Adam Dickinsons poems challenge our understanding of the world around us while simultaneously demonstrating the plasticity at work in the very words we use to describe this world. A wildly experimental and chemically reactive work, The Polymers thrills and provokes. Youll never look at the world of a poem — or the world itself — in the same way again.

Adam Dickinson: Adam Dickinsons poems have appeared in literary journals in Canada and internationally. His poetry has been translated into Chinese and Polish. His work has also been anthologized in Breathing Fire 2: Canadas New Poets, Post Prairie, The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Poetry from Canada and Ireland, The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science, and in Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems. His first book of poetry, Cartography and Walking, was short listed for an Alberta Book Award. His second collection, Kingdom, Phylum, was a finalist for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He recently co-edited the first ever anthology of contemporary Canadian ecopoetry, Regreen. He has published academic articles on contemporary poetry and science. Adam is currently Associate Professor of poetics at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he teaches poetry, creative writing, and literary theory.