Viral Suite explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.

Praise for Viral Suite:

"The poems in Viral Suite are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation,' including a palpable face-to-face throat singing with the poem as a body, proprioceptive and linguistic, and always right in front of us. Mari-Lou Rowley takes us down a homeo path of scientific and poetic lyric in an amazement of molecular dance through the lush genetics of life on the move. Very contagious stuff." (Fred Wah)

"The sciencing of language and the figurative elaboration of science in Viral Suite give the book an honest, raw energy. Rowley's destinations are various and startling, but in grappling with our precarious grasp on the world, she comes, literally, to terms." (Vallum)

"It is rare to see science and poetry mixed as seamlessly as they are in Mari-Lou Rowley's Viral Suite, but not surprising for Rowley, a science and technology writer. The linguistic gymnastics and energy of the verse is at its best when she combines the world of physics, mathematics and molecular biology with real physicality; as in the third section, ‘Elucidata.' Visceral gems such as ‘Sex in Space Time' allow language and image to do their work without interference from the empirical voice, ‘For the same reason the earth revolves around/ the sun, a hand falling through any arc of/ air will choose the swelling mass of thigh/ over nothing, for warmth/ for meaning.'" (This Magazine)

Viral Suite has been incorporated into university curricula in North America and Europe

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