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.

"These are lyrics that briefly and beautifully change our view of the world. In this effort, they do a quietly wild, beguilingly sudden work of making us rethink the ordinary before we can help ourselves, followed by the unnerving next part that hits us consequentially—we live in this world they are describing, though we had thought that we understood it perfectly well already."-Albert Rios

The Early History of Photography

The first photographer’s sister spent the summer watching the leaf-imprints disappear. Just like life, she wrote to him, but a little slower; like a chemical recipe for gratitude.

Shhh, the first photographer said, hovering over the silver salts arrayed like listening devices. Don’t let the sun know what we’re doing. This is a god we can capture and he’ll never know it, never miss these little fistfuls of glitter, dumbed down.

Dear sister, you must know the miracle is in the stoppage. Motion is cheap and plentiful; standing still is what costs and costs.

Jean Gallagher is Associate Professor of English at Polytechnic University in New York City. She is the author of The World Wars Through the Female Gaze.

To read a sample of Jean Gallagher’s poetry, visit www.poetsoutloud.com

The breadth and mastery of this awaited debut volume is matched by the poet’s insistence on the healing and transforming power of the human imagination. These are not notes from an artless heart—but observations from a simmering world.