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."

Jim Johnstone is a Canadian writer, editor, and physiologist. He is the author of four books of poetry: Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014), Sunday, the Locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008), as well as the subject of the critical monograph Proofs & Equational Love: The Poetry of Jim Johnstone by Shane Neilson and Jason Guriel. He has won several awards including a CBC Literary Award, Matrix Magazine?s LitPop Award, The Fiddlehead?s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and This Magazine?s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Currently, Johnstone is the Poetry Editor at Palimpsest Press, and an Associate Editor at Representative Poetry Online.

Jim Johnstone's profile page

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