Signal Infinities - A Poem

Winner of the DC Reid Poetry Prize • Longlisted for the 2025 Fred Cogswell Award for Excellence in Poetry

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.