Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry! To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years. The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic -- how the mind contains both -- and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person? Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe 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.

About the Author
Matthew Tierney is the author of one previous book of poetry, Full speed through the morning dark. He has been published in journals and magazines across Canada. In 2005, he won first and second place in This Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt. In 2006, he was a recipient of a K. M. Hunter Award. He lives in Toronto.

Reviews
'The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The Hayflick Limit to the hoop.' -- David McGimpsey, author of Li'l Bastard and Sitcom 'Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight ... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.' -- Eye Weekly 'Tierney accomplishes certain Albert Goldbarthian feats, weaving whiz-bang with philosophical insights that will break your heart' -- American Literary Review 'Aiming for the unknown inside the known, freedom inside our biological limits, Tierney's strategized, highly fluent poems ... break from self-consciousness into true, heartfelt insight.' Winnipeg Free Press



Book Information
ISBN 9781552452172
Author Matthew Tierney
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Coach House Books
Publisher Coach House Books
Weight(grams) 141g