The Cloud Versus Grand Unification Theory
Poems
Chris Banks
9781770413689
88 pages
Ecw Press
Overview
Consciousness and nostalgia in the Swipe Right age
This collection attempts to find poetry, or what Gwendolyn MacEwen once called “a single symmetry,” amid the chaos of 21st-century life. A powerful catalogue of loss and human connection, it considers not only how our identities are formed by places and experiences rooted in childhood, but also by digital newsfeeds, YouTube, and the “gospel of Spotify.” These poems intimately confront topics as diverse as quantum physics, video arcades, mental illness, climate change, road rage, alcoholism, endangered species, and even a gigantic Noah’s Ark replica.
Chris Banks is a poet known for packing his lines with thought and feeling. Building on the generous work of John Koethe, Larry Levis, and Ada Limón, Banks’s wildly expansive, often lyric, deeply accessible poems are brilliant meditations on what it means to be human in a brave new world of cloud computing and smart phones.
Author Bio
Chris Banks is the author of Bonfires, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, and Winter Cranes. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004 and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in the New Quarterly, Arc, the Antigonish Review, Event, the Malahat Review, and Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.
