Samuel Andreyev inhabits several worlds: he is bilingual and lives in France; he is an internationally-known composer; and he is a writer whose material is the bric-a-brac of everyday speech and rhetoric, forged into a poetry of obsessive perfectionism.
Part mental autobiography, part ode to a new, radically mobile consciousness—The Relativistic Empire combines the diagrammatic elegance of the comic strip with the complexity and elusiveness of symbolism.

Samuel Andreyev is a writer, composer, teacher, and performer whose vocal, chamber, and orchestral compositions are performed around the world. He operated The Expert Press, a small press devoted to contemporary poetry, for several years in Toronto. His first major collection of poems, entitled Evidence, was released in 2009. Born and raised in Ontario, Andreyev studied composition, musical acoustics, orchestration, electroacoustics, and musical analysis at the Paris Conservatory and (CNSMDP) and IRCAM (Paris). He has lived in France since 2003, where he is currently employed as a Professor of Musical Analysis at Conservatoire de Cambrai (France), and as a freelance composer, writer, and oboist. Connect with Andreyev at www.samuelandreyev.com or Twitter @samuelandreyev.

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"The Relativistic Empire is a carnival of specific instructions. Andreyev's declensions describe absurd reality. Humour takes the poems on all the rides, from 'real' to 'false' in all their mirrors."—Alice Burdick, author of Holler

“Andreyev uses his line breaks a lot to undermine general sense, yet this jagged little pile of words does its job of keeping readers off balance & dancing to his tune.”—Electric Ruckus

“Andreyev uses his line breaks a lot to undermine general sense, yet this jagged little pile of words does its job of keeping readers off balance & dancing to his tune.”—Electric Ruckus

"The Relativistic Empire is a carnival of specific instructions. Andreyev's declensions describe absurd reality. Humour takes the poems on all the rides, from 'real' to 'false' in all their mirrors."—Alice Burdick, author of Holler

"The Relativistic Empire shows the exquisite in the everyday; the slips of the tongue which sharpen the pencil's point until it bleeds. Our things—and the names we give them—slide from strange to stranger, from contained to container. Whistling the orchestration of a beautiful 'teflon ballet,' Andreyev makes the poem march to clockwork and despair."—derek beaulieu, author of Please, No More Poetry and How to Write

“These are poems that react, question and comment, shifting both the familiar and the unfamiliar into their opposites.”—rob mclennan's blog

“Andreyev uses his line breaks a lot to undermine general sense, yet this jagged little pile of words does its job of keeping readers off balance & dancing to his tune.”—Electric Ruckus

"The Relativistic Empire shows the exquisite in the everyday; the slips of the tongue which sharpen the pencil's point until it bleeds. Our things—and the names we give them—slide from strange to stranger, from contained to container. Whistling the orchestration of a beautiful 'teflon ballet,' Andreyev makes the poem march to clockwork and despair."—derek beaulieu, author of Please, No More Poetry and How to Write