{"product_id":"signal-infinities-isbn-9780771013980","title":"Signal Infinities","description":"\u003cb\u003eWinner of the DC Reid Poetry Prize • Longlisted for the 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eExpansive and moving, \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities \u003c\/i\u003ecourses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits, in search of more enlivening, ethical relationships with each other and the earth.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention. Pain arrives. Collective and personal injuries and errors pile up. The glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnlike the \u003ci\u003eIliad\u003c\/i\u003e’s soldiers, the cast of youth in this long poem harbour traumas that are internal, hidden, unsung. Yet each wounded one flickers with defiance and dignity. So too the blue-collar winds, the little brown bats and roadside ferns who send out their urgent signals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes, tonal shifts, chemical transmissions and streaming kinesics. It seeks an ethics that respects the body’s imperfect intercom, its private coulees and unstable weathers, its sheer limits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmid too-little-too-late conditions, \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e floods with connections that are elemental, illuminating and wildly felt.\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e and Melanie Siebert\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinner of the DC Reid Poetry Prize • Longlisted for the 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e is an extreme act of empathy and a profoundly ethical gesture towards the “unknowable interiority” of others. These poems embody human suffering and environmental collapse, human resilience and the buoyancy of water. Siebert uses language with skill and urgency to short the circuit between the personal (deeply relatable) and universal (somehow, suddenly, fathomable). It is poetry’s gift to articulate unrecognized connections, and Signal Infinities reads like a revelation – that trauma, systemic injustice, and ecological harms share the same root; and that healing, as a multidimensional and interconnected act, is possible.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jury Citation, DC Reid Poetry Book Prize\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“\u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e presents no simple guidance, no readily-digested messages. As it must, to be honest, it instead offers the intricate loopings of words, designated as yearnings towards trust. And is thus, ‘Tremendously electric.’”\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—Catherine Owen, \u003ci\u003eBritish Columbia Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The beauty of the double-head therapeutic dialectic flashes through these lightly water-haunted poems, where 'a dipper works the dusky edges\/with underwater vision.' The talkers in all the sessions here have such vision and more. The stakes are high. One voice has 'stolen depression as a perfect disguise,' and this is only the starting point for them; another wants to die. \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e is gripping, heart-tearing.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Tim Lilburn, author of \u003ci\u003eNuminous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"In other times, mind and world were one and the body was a manifestation of that unity. Today, we suffer separation and therapy is the navigation of contradictions. In \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e, Melanie Siebert returns mind to the world and the world to the body so that 'the polyamorous sea' is coextensive with 'a surplus of irretrievably private coulees.' There is no therapy for truth, no cure. Reading this book, I felt the sublime terror of true poetry. I write this with tears in my eyes.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Matt Rader, author of \u003ci\u003eFine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"A stunning, intricately intelligent book about porousness—the vulnerability of all beings to their environments—as both an axis of harm and a tool of resistance. When 'ungovernable winds lift the patented seeds,' what might it look like to join forces with those winds? Which is to say, let ourselves be carried too. Beautiful, surprising, provocative work.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—River Halen, author of \u003ci\u003eDream Rooms\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Amidst the relentless background static of catastrophe—colonialism, ecocide—Melanie Siebert’s finely-tuned poems gather focus. \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e, mutable and kinetic, 'osprey-eye alert,' offers a means to attend to the unknowable otherness of the traumatized world, the body, and memory. The imperative of Siebert’s profession becomes a pulsing refrain, 'do no harm \/ do no harm' but also, crucially, '[d]o something.'\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sheri Benning, author of \u003ci\u003eField Requiem\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"In Melanie Siebert’s \u003ci\u003eSignal Infinities\u003c\/i\u003e, bodies meeting one another in a therapist’s office are sentient bodies of water. Whether our bodies are suicidal, grieving, and dissociating, or assessing, diagnosing and making case notes, a great knowing lake of water is distributed among us and it 'intuits a blown-off-course blue.' These poems trace, in therapeutic encounters, a 'limnology of survival,' of lake reading lake, as the poet gauges another water’s struggle to return, through care and relation, to flows of deep self-recognition. I loved this book for convincing me that the water in all of us is one system, striving always for balance.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sonnet L'Abbé, author of \u003ci\u003eSonnet’s Shakespeare\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"Melanie Siebert is a poet who wields lines of intense complexity and simplicity, of compression and release, seemingly without effort.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Philip Kevin Paul, author of \u003ci\u003eLittle Hunger\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eMELANIE SIEBERT is the author of \u003ci\u003eDeepwater Vee\u003c\/i\u003e, a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. Her nonfiction book \u003ci\u003eHeads Up: Changing Minds on Mental Health\u003c\/i\u003e won the Lane Anderson Award for best science writing for young readers in Canada and was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize. Melanie grew up in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan, raised as a white, third-generation settler of European\/Mennonite heritage. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest on the beautiful homelands of the W̱SÁNEĆ Nations and the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. Melanie practices attachment-focused and nature-based therapy in Victoria, BC.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303249760485,"sku":"NP9780771013980","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771013980.jpg?v=1767736611","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/signal-infinities-isbn-9780771013980","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}