Infinity Pool

Moving through the realms of digital technologies, these poems cut to the core of our physical human experiences amid a virtually mediated world.  Diving through illusions and phantoms of virtual realms and into the human desire for boundless possibility, Infinity Pool charts the ways technologies have become embedded in our minds, bodies, and lives. Immersed in a world of data streams, neural nets, spider algorithms, and electronic terminals, Jonathan Thirkield’s poems plumb the dissonances and shrinking distances between ourselves and digital technologies, imagining what becomes of the fragile machinery of the human body amid a rapidly transforming world.  Thirkield turns to language as a mediator and explores infinity as a mathematical concept, a multiverse conceit, and a driver of the computational imagination. Traveling across the full spectrum of digital experience—from satellites crossing the edges of our solar system to microscopic bytes that operate beneath our perception—this collection is a testament to the future we imagine ourselves to be living through and to what happens when our escapist desires give way to the realities of birth, loss, parenthood, and sickness.  Through lyrical, narrative, and formal mutations, these poems cut through a decade of exponential technological growth, landing in the reality of our corporeal experiences: the isolation of chronic illness, the daunting journeys of children growing up today, and the hope that we can remain connected to each other no matter how tenuous the ties.