The Polymers

This poetry collection is framed as a made-up scientific experiment. Its pieces take plastics as their subject and ask how poetry and chemistry might inform one another, with the aim of grasping the part plastics play in human culture. Using a range of procedures, rules and shifts in form, the poems carry over the repeating patterns of plastic molecules into everyday cultural and linguistic habits, such as quarrels, worries and fashions.

The book is highly experimental, and its language reacts with its materials in unexpected ways. Readers who come to it may find that their sense of how a poem works, and of the world it describes, shifts as they read.