Tierney, Matthew: Lossless

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Coach House Books, paperback Publication Date: May 7, 2024 Publisher Marketing: Taking its title from lossless data compression algorithms, Lossless transmits through time and spac e 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 Show more