Overview

For millennia humanity has looked upward and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward. In Supergiants, Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, Flemmer reorients the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Through it all, Flemmer shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

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9781998408146

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Reviews

""Can poetry achieve the escape velocity it needs to outrun the logic of the market? That's open to debate, and Flemmer's barcode poems - plus his attached statement - weigh in with wit, vigour, and originality. If you're looking for a quick read that rewards repeated use, Barcode Poetry will get you there. Proceed to checkout."" - Bryce Warnes - Carousel Magazine ""Kyle Flemmer revels in the language of astronomy and the names we pin on celestial objects like flags on the Moon - but goes beyond wordplay to 'transcription of the human element.' In sequences like Astral Projection and Stellar Sequence, he maps correspondences between scientific concepts and our other thought patterns - mythological, political and personal. Deeply inventive and thought-provoking."" - Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene and Knife on Snow ""The bright and inventive constellations of Flemmer's poems bend ho-hum literary space-time with texts infused by both light and gravity, delicacy and resonance, intelligence and wit, and transmit the alienness, tenderness and wonder of what it is to find oneself an earthling and already living in the future."" - Gary Barwin, author Scandal at the Alphorn Factory and Yiddish for Pirates ""There is a fascinating tension between the digital chill of the barcode and the manifest humanity of the poems themselves: each poem was typed out on 1940 Remington Rand Deluxe Model 5 typewriter, and the book preserves the individuality of the keystrokes, so that each letter is filled with the analogue warm of its production. There is, as you read, the constant sense of fingers depressing keys to send one arm after another whipping towards the sheet of paper, and I can't think of a recent book that has so effectively foregrounded the corporality of its production."" - Aaron Schneider - The /tƐmz/ Review

Author Information

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and released his first book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021. Flemmer is the author of many chapbooks and his work has appeared in anthologies and exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Supergiants is Kyle's first trade book of poetry, and his next, The Wiki of Babel, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press.

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