The Polymers is a bold new work from one of our most ambitious poetic minds. Structured as an imaginary science project, the varied pieces in this collection investigate the intersection of poetry and chemicals, specifically plastics, attempting to understand their essential role in culture. Through various procedures, constraints, and formal mutations, the poems express the repeating structures fundamental to plastic molecules as they appear in cultural and linguistic behaviours such as arguments, anxieties, and trends.

A wildly experimental and chemically reactive work, The Polymers thrills and provokes. You’ll never look at the world of a poem — or the world itself — in the same way again.

ADAM DICKINSON was born in Bracebridge, Ontario. He is the author of four books of poetry, including Anatomic(2018), a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and winner of the Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize from the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and twice for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He was also a finalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Poetry Prize and the K. M. Hunter Artist Award in Literature. His work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, and Polish. He has been featured at international literary festivals such as Poetry International in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the Oslo International Poetry Festival in Norway. He was also part of the VERSschmuggel poetry translation project hosted in conjunction with Poesiefestival Berlin, Germany. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Adam Dickinson's profile page

• Short-listed, The Governor General's Literary Awards

Between being amused at the interjections Dickinson makes into usually scientific conventions, forms and language, and being enthralled by the occasional breath-taking metaphorical leap that extends far deeper than the surface level lightness, I couldn’t put this book down once I’d opened it.

Lemon Hound

This is smart poetry, evasive poetry, deeply specific poetry and it is worth the challenge.

Winnipeg Review

A wildly experimental and chemically reactive work, The Polymers thrills and provokes. You’ll never look at the world of a poem — or the world itself — in the same way again.

Open Book Toronto

...a must-read for chemists interested in the plastic limits of culture; for poets interested in the cultural limits of plastics; for environmentalists keen on linguistics; for lovers of the weirdly incongruous; and for all of us denizens of the not so distant future...

Gulf Coast