The poems in Catastrophe Theories reflect an increasingly unstable, surreal, and catastrophic world. Written over the past decade, the poems in Mari-Lou Rowley's oracular work capture the zeitgeist of the moment. A world where human folly and frailty compete with corpocracy and technological determinism against the stubborn magnificence of the natural world.

Yet, these poems are neither prescriptive nor hopeless. Exploring the lives and concepts of mathematicians such as Euclid, Hypatia, Alan Turing, and René Thom, along with dream imagery and her love of science and nature, Rowley toys with perception, fractures reality into kaleidoscopic visions, then brings the reader back to small, everyday moments of truth or joy. As her speaker says, "Rejoice or regret. You decide."

Mari-Lou Rowley has published six previous collections of poetry, most recently CosmoSonnets (JackPine 2007) and Viral Suite (Anvil Press 2004). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada and the US—and on Canadian Association of Physicists website. Rowley has performed her poetry across the continent, from Harbourfront to Seattle, where she performed at Bumbershoot, Seattle’s annual arts extravaganza. She also participated in the Poetic Ecologies conference in Brussels in May 2008. Rowley has a Master’s of Liberal Studies degree from Simon Fraser University. A science writer and avid star gazer, her favourite constellation is Orion. Her favourite cosmological phenomena are binary pulsars. In 2006 she moved to Saskatoon from Vancouver to be closer to the sky.

Mari-Lou Rowley's profile page

Advance praise:

"These poems are immaculate knots and bone spurs of thought. Rowley is a master at cracking open language to reveal the luminosity of the quantum realm. Whether conjuring ghosts, the delicacy of numbers, dark desires or the magnitude of chaos, Rowley creates an aesthetic space where words linger like sparrow song on the day's dust. This is a beautifully crafted and thoughtfully mapped journey to the lighthouse where Rowley reminds us that out of the hexagon, sweet honey flows." - Lillian Necakov, author of il virus