Praise for Signal Infinities and Melanie Siebert
Winner of the DC Reid Poetry Prize
“Signal Infinities 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.”
—Jury Citation, DC Reid Poetry Book Prize
“Signal Infinities 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.’”
—Catherine Owen, British Columbia Review
“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. Signal Infinities is gripping, heart-tearing.”
—Tim Lilburn, author of Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change
“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 Signal Infinities, 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.”
—Matt Rader, author of Fine
“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.”
—River Halen, author of Dream Rooms
“Amidst the relentless background static of catastrophe—colonialism, ecocide—Melanie Siebert’s finely-tuned poems gather focus. Signal Infinities, 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.'”
—Sheri Benning, author of Field Requiem
“In Melanie Siebert’s Signal Infinities, 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.”
—Sonnet L’Abbé, author of Sonnet’s Shakespeare
“Melanie Siebert is a poet who wields lines of intense complexity and simplicity, of compression and release, seemingly without effort.”
—Philip Kevin Paul, author of Little Hunger
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