Infinity Network

by Jim Johnstone

Infinity Network completes Jim Johnstone ’s ambitious trilogy which began with Dog Ear (2014) and continued with The Chemical Life (2017). Central to each volume is the struggle with identity at a time of great social change. Justifiably acclaimed for his exquisite rendering of acute states of mind, Johnstone explores pressing questions about the ubiquity of surveillance and social media, and evokes, with a powerful intelligence, the neurosis of living in a consumerism-obsessed era. Infinity Network not only attempts to capture the changing ideas of personhood, but also tries to create a new kind of verse to track it—a complex, bold, stark style able to give uncanny interiority to our digital dreads. As our lives descend further into disinformation and algorithmic control, Johnstone has emerged as the laureate of, in Keats’s words, truth “proved upon our pulses.”

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2022

Reviews

[Spencer Folkins]

Within a week, I've read 'Dog Ear,' 'The Chemical Life,' and now 'Infinity Network.' Here, you will find excellent writing, heavy themes, fun language. In each, there is a penultimate section for a (serialized) longer poem, as well as at least one poem in each collection near the end with a math/science equation in or following the title as an epigraph (these equations, thankfully, are provided context in the Notes sections of 'The Chemical Life' and 'Infinity Network'). The Notes sections provide further context for songs and other media referenced throughout each collection, adding to the richness of Johnstone's poetic world, his synthesizing of media, culture, an underlying and urban sense of danger both existential and physical, all real.

There is jargon, adding again to the richness, but none of it is alienating or gets in the way of enjoying these poems. Johnstone also experiments with some new tricks: a different dimension to the poem is achieved by adding a blackout-style pinhole on the page following much of the initial text of the poem 'Identity as a Wormhole in a Hotel Window'—it's as though The Very Hungry Catepillar has chomped through just this page or, perhaps more appropriately, it's like peering at the poem through a keyhole.

There is an arc throughout these collections that I found rewarding, reading them in close proximity to one another. 'Infinity Network' explores our selves just as 'Dog Ear' and 'The Chemical Life,' but with an added focus on identity and how we communicate within an increasingly digital dynamic. How, through the digitization of our cultures and identities, our vices and anxieties about those vices are confounded, the antidotes warped. My favourite poem in this collection is 'Radio Silence,' particularly the last sentence in this poem.

I like that 'Infinity Network' deals not only with recovery, but also relapse (or appears to, if the poems are to be read in sequence)—which, of course, is part of recovery. Poems within the collection jump back and forth in time; Time circles in on itself, poems occur and reoccur—take, for example, The Ouroboros and The Ouroboros (Reprise), fittingly the first and last poems in this collection. Form and (echo chamber) content blend perfectly.

'Infinity Network' provides some resolution to the anxieties examined in previous collections while also promising that these never disappear entirely. One evolves alongside their vices. In this collection, Johnstone expertly achieves a tone at once hopeful and damning. It is a feat I think few could manage as skillfully and as thoughtfully.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strict form houses open wounds. Powerful work.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Johnstone’s poems, Toronto becomes a microcosm for actions and thoughts that far exceed the city’s limits. There is something frightful about the poems in Infinity Network, yet they do not freeze the reader in their tracks, rendering them immobile out of paranoid panic. Johnstone shows how to be anxious can serve as a push (I hesitate to think of it even as a form of “motivation”). There is a kind of fluidity of boundaries, between the speaker/self and their surroundings, that feels apt, the divide between the personal and the collective similarly blurring.

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars

[Luigi Sposato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeously brutal.