Böcker av Matthew Tierney

Taking its title from lossless data compression algorithms, Lossless transmits through time and space those ‘stabs of self’ that intensify with loss of relationships, of faith, of childhood, of people. The qualities of light, colour, and movement in the book’s forty-eight sonnets conjure a sense of arrested time, of motes in the air, while chapters of Borgesian prose poems extract knowledge from information to reconstruct a subjectivity, a personality, and a life."Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity.” – Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his 'freefall of associative memory,' where the past flickers presently and futures bend toward the start. Invoking the dogmas of digital media, quantum mechanics and philosophy, Lossless is the devlog of a child becoming father of the man. A 'greybeard & tweener' at once, Tierney conjures his Gen Xer youth—neighborhood bullies, the first kiss, jogging with a Walkman on—to tweak his hi-fi output as a husband and fumbling dad. Given a spacetime continuum offering 'viaducts of alternate choices,' in which everyone, at the molecular level, is 'swappable soma' at best, Tierney parses 'compossible paths' from 'incompatibilism,' trying to track the quirks and quarks of multidimensional life. In troubleshot sonnets and corrupted prose, this book is an ode to the lost art of losing gracefully." – Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun

To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early 1960s, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, it sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.Shifting focus between the limits of the microscope and the limits of the telescope, Matthew Tierney gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe, one that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.