Infinity Network

Infinity Network completes Jim Johnstone‘s ambitious trilogy which began with Dog Ear (2014) and continued with The Chemical Life (2017). Central to each volume is the struggle with identity at a time of great social change. Justifiably acclaimed for his exquisite rendering of acute states of mind, Johnstone explores pressing questions about the ubiquity of surveillance and social media, and evokes, with a powerful intelligence, the neurosis of living in a consumerism-obsessed era. Infinity Network not only attempts to capture the changing ideas of personhood, but also tries to create a new kind of verse to track it—a complex, bold, stark style able to give uncanny interiority to our digital dreads. As our lives descend further into disinformation and algorithmic control, Johnstone has emerged as the laureate of, in Keats’s words, truth “proved upon our pulses.”

Reviews

“From selfhood to self-consumption, gunfire to the ‘black gasp suck(ing) back into the gun,’ the poems in Infinity Network loop, reverse, and reiterate, caught in the viral cycle that characterizes the violent, post-truth, solipsistic cultural moment. Poetry cannot, and should not, escape the consequences of the echo chamber we have made, and Johnstone is daring in his willingness to take it on—identity’s slippage, and the anxiety that comes as we commute through our days and nights, ‘the train burrowing / from station to station like a worm,’ through a network of strangers—as subject, image, and sound. Infinity Network’s diagnosis is clear: ‘The problem is / us.’ Let’s break some mirrors.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets

“What is fleeting and what is meaningful converge in Johnstone’s skillful, dreamlike—or fantastically big-screen-like—imagery.” – Robyn Fadden, Montreal Review of Books

“Johnstone discovers new ways of cataloging and expressing one of the most challenging topics for a poet to handle, the abstract ideas of the infinite.” -Bruce Meyer, South Shore Review

Praise for The Chemical Life:

“Images so visceral, primal—yet controlled—that they leave us disoriented, seeing double.” — Marcella Huerta & Tess Liem, Montreal Review of Books

“In many ways, Johnstone is a mysterious poet. The inner world of his poems is full of strange associations and dreamlike successions of images. It is a bold, skillful sort of poetry, and it makes one curious what canyons he will attempt in the years to come.” — University of Toronto Quarterly

“Johnstone’s poetry is incredibly efficient; there are no wasted words. Both thematically and technically, there is a dirty edge to many of these poems, which gives them a raw and uncensored feel.” — The New Quarterly