Expansive and moving, Signal Infinities courses with the intelligences of the body, its music and limits, in search of more enlivening, ethical relationships with each other and the earth.

In Signal Infinities a therapist takes up an apprenticeship to a lake, to bare attention. Pain arrives. Collective and personal injuries and errors pile up. The glaciers and ancient forests are disappearing.

Unlike the Iliad’s soldiers, the cast of youth in this long poem harbour traumas that are internal, hidden, unsung. Yet each wounded one flickers with defiance and dignity. So too the blue-collar winds, the little brown bats and roadside ferns who send out their urgent signals.

With unbridled oxygen affinity, this work attunes to submerged sensations, reflexes, tonal shifts, chemical transmissions and streaming kinesics. It seeks an ethics that respects the body’s imperfect intercom, its private coulees and unstable weathers, its sheer limits.

Amid too-little-too-late conditions, Signal Infinities floods with connections that are elemental, illuminating and wildly felt.

Melanie Siebert is a youth and family counsellor in Victoria, British Columbia. She works with people to transform depression, anxiety, trauma, and inner conflict into meaning, purpose, and hope. She also specializes in suicide intervention and prevention. Melanie has a Master of Social Work and a Master of Fine Arts. She has also worked as an emergency medical technician, a river guide and a creative writing instructor. Her first poetry collection, Deepwater Vee (McClelland & Stewart), was a finalist for Canada's Governor General's Literary Award.

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Praise for Signal Infinities and Melanie Siebert

"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