The Imaginary Present: Essays in Quantum Poetics

by Amy Catanzano

The Imaginary Present by award-winning poet and professor Amy Catanzano explores cutting-edge scientific fields such as particle physics and astrophysics, and branches of physics such as quantum theory and relativity, through a poetic vision equally loyal to the imagination and rationality. Drawing upon her groundbreaking research and artist residencies at major scientific research centers like CERN and the U.S. National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, as well as talks and poetry readings at esteemed institutions, Catanzano invites enthusiasts of poetry and science to consider what can be achieved through greater collaboration between these fields. 



In linked chapters that fluidly blend lyric essay, literary and scientific analysis, poetry, theory, and memoir, The Imaginary Present offers refreshing new insights on a wide range of thinkers over the past 100 years, including poets Rae Armantrout and M. NourbeSe Philip, novelists Alfred Jarry and Virginia Woolf, comic book writer Grant Morrison, and physicists Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. The introduction explores why poetry and physics are capable of jointly investigating our most fundamental questions about the universe and discusses the history of the art-science connection in addition to the author’s own journey. In searching for the groundbreaking ways that artists and scientists can collaborate, The Imaginary Present offers readers both reasoned grounding and poetic framing for an interdisciplinary poetics and praxis based on science.

130 pages, Paperback

Published February 19, 2025

About the author

Amy Catanzano is the author of three books. Her cross-genre novella combining poetry with fiction, Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press, 2014), received the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction. Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009) received the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and was selected by Michael Palmer for publication as the recipient of Fordham University's Poets Out Loud Prize. iEpiphany was published by Anne Waldman’s independent publishing venture, Erudite Fangs Editions, in 2009. She is also the author of an electronic-chapbook, the heartbeat is a fractal (Ahadada Books, 2009). Her poetry, fiction, and cross-genre writing has appeared in literary journals such as Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence Magazine,and New American Writing. Recent speculative essays on the intersections of literature, art, and science appear in Jacket2 and Poems and Poetics. Catanzano is an Assistant Professor of English, the Poet-in-Residence, and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Prior to teaching at Wake Forest, Catanzano taught at Naropa University in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, co-founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in poetry writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Selected Links:
Jacket2: The Imaginary Present
Quantum Poetics at Poems and Poetics
Jacket2: Poetry & Science
I09: Best Books of Poetry for Every Kind of Science Fiction Fan
Action Yes
Tarpaulin Sky Journal
La Petite Zine
Web Conjunctions