The Imaginary Present
Essays in Quantum Poetics
Exploring the questions of the universe through poetry and science
Description
Finalist: 19th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards - Poetry Category | June 19, 2025
The Imaginary Present by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. Drawing upon her groundbreaking research and artist residencies at major scientific research centers like CERN and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, as well as talks and poetry readings at esteemed institutions, Catanzano invites enthusiasts of poetry and science to consider what can be achieved through greater collaboration between these fields.
In linked chapters that fluidly blend lyric essay, literary and scientific analysis, poetry, theory, and memoir, The Imaginary Present offers refreshing new insights on a wide range of thinkers over the past 100 years, including poets Rae Armantrout and M. NourbeSe Philip, novelists Alfred Jarry and Virginia Woolf, comic book writer Grant Morrison, and physicists Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The introduction explores why poetry and physics are capable of jointly investigating our most fundamental questions about the universe and discusses the history of the art-science connection in addition to the author’s own journey. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.
Amy Catanzano is a professor and the poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University and the lead co-founder of The Entanglements Network, a global collective exploring the intersections of poetry and science. Author of three previous books, her honors include the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and Noemi Press Book Award in Fiction.
Reviews
Amy Catanzano brings the seemingly disparate worlds of poetry and quantum physics together in a uniquely creative way by fully embracing and exploring the core principles of both realms. She challenges the ways we think about and implement each one, providing a deeper appreciation for both and for how connected they are.
- Mark Kruse, Department of Physics, Duke University
Blasting through the barrier of metaphor, Amy Catanzano's The Imaginary Present brings us, at vertiginous speed of light, into the multiverse of dimensionalities, where poetry in superposition exposes cosmos to the questions of quantum poetics, exploring daringly the physics of the impossible, and speculating inventively on the yet conceptless concepts . . .
- Ming-Qian Ma, SUNY-Buffalo
No lasting poetry from any era has ever flourished without an underlying cosmovision. No scientific revolution has existed without its poetic complement. For poets of antiquity like Lucretius, the harmonization of mundus with cosmos was de rigueur. Later, poets in the era of Aristotelian physics, and later yet, poets in the wake of the Newtonian revolution, struggled with the justification of poetics by science, and vice versa. And until very recently, the Quantum and Multiverse revolutions have been in danger of not finding our epoch's Great Interlocutor. Amy Catanzano's The Imaginary Present is a TITANIC endeavor that merits immediate and wide attention not just by scientists and poets, but by anyone who is striving to become a contemporary. These spellbinding essays have flung me into a state of utter ecstasy.
- Rodrigo Toscano, author of The Cut Point
Finalist: 19th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards - Poetry Category | June 19, 2025
- National Indie Excellence Awards