Amy Catanzano – författare

Finalist: 19th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards - Poetry Category | June 19, 2025The Imaginary Present by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. Drawing upon her groundbreaking research and artist residencies at major scientific research centers like CERN and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, as well as talks and poetry readings at esteemed institutions, Catanzano invites enthusiasts of poetry and science to consider what can be achieved through greater collaboration between these fields. In linked chapters that fluidly blend lyric essay, literary and scientific analysis, poetry, theory, and memoir, The Imaginary Present offers refreshing new insights on a wide range of thinkers over the past 100 years, including poets Rae Armantrout and M. NourbeSe Philip, novelists Alfred Jarry and Virginia Woolf, comic book writer Grant Morrison, and physicists Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The introduction explores why poetry and physics are capable of jointly investigating our most fundamental questions about the universe and discusses the history of the art-science connection in addition to the author’s own journey. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.

The Imaginary Present by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. Drawing upon her groundbreaking research and artist residencies at major scientific research centers like CERN and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, as well as talks and poetry readings at esteemed institutions, Catanzano invites enthusiasts of poetry and science to consider what can be achieved through greater collaboration between these fields.  In linked chapters that fluidly blend lyric essay, literary and scientific analysis, poetry, theory, and memoir, The Imaginary Present offers refreshing new insights on a wide range of thinkers over the past 100 years, including poets Rae Armantrout and M. NourbeSe Philip, novelists Alfred Jarry and Virginia Woolf, comic book writer Grant Morrison, and physicists Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The introduction explores why poetry and physics are capable of jointly investigating our most fundamental questions about the universe and discusses the history of the art-science connection in addition to the author’s own journey. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.

Winner of the PEN USA Literary Award in PoetryWinner of the Poets Out Loud Prize Multiversal, the second book by Amy Catanzano proposing a theory of quantum poetics, invites readers to explore the intersections between language, nature, science, and consciousness. Multiversal takes its name from the "multiverse," a science fiction concept that has become an accepted theory in physics. It suggests that reality comprises multiple dimensions in space and time. In form and content, this collection takes novel approaches to the materiality of language itself, to the spacetime of poems.From the Foreword by Michael Palmer: 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. In a time of displacement such as ours, she seems to say, in place of "universals" we must imagine "multiversals," in place of the fixed, the metamorphic. 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 hereand-now, "the flowering of the world," the corrosiveness of violence, the primacy of desire, the necessity of wonder. 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.