A science-inspired sequence that positions poems as technology Tierney’s new collection, which takes its title from lossless data compression algorithms, positions the sonnet as a piece of technology, a means of transmission through time and space such that the original experience — the source, if you like — can be wholly reconstructed with no loss of information.
Lossless is a sequence of spare sonnets of slant rhyme and compact syntax that conjure existential pinpoints, the ‘stabs of self’ that accompany universal loss of childhood, of relationships, of faith, of people. The sequence is bridged by chapters of Borgesian prose poems — with appearances from Duns Scotus and Simone Weil, Wittgenstein, and Niels Bohr — that extract knowledge from information, from Virginia Woolf’s ‘moments of being, ’ to reconstruct a subjectivity, a personality, and a life."Tierney tracks and backtracks in the realm of dispossession like a cross between a physicist and a magician from a future era. These poems are new forms for human heart and quiddity.” – Anne-Marie Turza, author of Fugue with Bedbug"In this wise, wonky, poignant avowal of error and losslessness, Matthew Tierney geotags his “freefall of associative memory, ” where the past flickers presently and futures bend toward the start. Invoking the dogmas of digital media, quantum mechanics and philosophy, Lossless is the devlog of a child becoming father of the man. A “greybeard & tweener” at once, Tierney conjures his Gen Xer youth—neighborhood bullies, the first kiss, jogging with a Walkman on—to tweak his hi-fi output as a husband and fumbling dad. Given a spacetime continuum offering “viaducts of alternate choices, ” in which everyone, at the molecular level, is “swappable soma” at best, Tierney parses “compossible paths” from “incompatibilism, ” trying to track the quirks and quarks of multidimensional life. In troubleshot sonnets and corrupted prose, this book is a “thisway-thataway” ode to the lost art of losing gracefully." – Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun