Midday at the Super-Kamiokande

Midday at the Super-Kamiokande is part existentialist cry, part close encounters of the other kind. Think Kierkegaard in a spacesuit, Kubrik in a Left Bank café.
Like the neutrino observatory of its title, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande seeks “glimpses of the obscure” to carve out meaning, alternately a resistance to rationalism and its champion. It aims to tear through abstraction with the concrete, either catastrophic – road accidents, nuclear explosions, floods, extinction, eviction, suicide – or quotidian, finding threads of love, empathy, and belief within the fray. These poems delight in aphorism, paradox, puns, and wit, each stanza a closure that moves tangentially to the next, each poem more bricolage than narrative, more shuffle than playlist. These are poems with no middle. These are poems of beginnings, and of ends.

AUTHOR

Matthew Tierney

Matthew Tierney is the author of four books of poetry. His most recent, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande, was nominated for a ReLit Award. He won the 2013 Trillium Book Award for Poetry and is also a recipient of the K. M. Hunter Award and the P.K. Page Founders’ Award. He works for U of T as a writer in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and lives in the east end of Toronto with his wife and son.

Reviews

There’s a brand-new law of thermodynamics waiting to be discovered in the poems of Matthew Tierney, which zip and whiz about the page with beguiling abandon. Catalyzed by the paradoxes and predicaments of the contemporary, Midday at the Super-Kamiokande forms an extended dispatch from a poet of astonishing observational powers. This book casts an eerie light from beneath its front door that will instantly pull you closer.’ – Dobby Gibson, author of It Becomes You