Amy Catanzano is an American poet from Boulder, CO. She is the author of Multiversal, which won the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. Michael Palmer describes her work as "a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity, and an open space that is motile and multidimensional." Since 2009 she has published writing on a theory and practice called "quantum poetics," which explores the intersections of poetry and science, particularly physics. Her other interests include cross-genre texts and the literary avant-garde.
Life and work
Her first book of poetry, , was published by Anne Waldman. In 2009, Catanzano's was published as the recipient of the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press. Multiversal went on to receive the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. Previous winners of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry include Claudia Rankine, Anne Waldman, Craig Santos Perez, Seido Ray Ronci, Juan Felipe Herrera, Brian Turner, Martha Ronk, Donald Revell, Norman Dubie, Bob Kaufman, Carl Rakosi, Thom Gunn, Czeslaw Milosz, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Michael Palmer, and David Antin. Catanzano's third full-length collection, , combines poetry with fiction. It was published by Noemi Press in 2014 and won the Noemi Book Award. Cindra Halm in Rain Taxi writes that it "is a mind-full, mine-filled, field of literary, aesthetic, scientific, and imaginative constructs that take forms as collage, cultural allegory, anti-war expression, epistolary conversation, and song-of-joy-in-risk-taking, to list merely a few." Catanzano is an associate professor in creative writing and the poet-in-residence at . She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and taught at Naropa University until 2011, serving as the administrative director of the Department of Writing and Poetics in the . She was also the managing editor for the literary magazine .
Awards and honors
Arts and Humanities Award from Wake Forest University to conduct research on the at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. , Stony Brook University. Arts and Humanities Award from Wake Forest University to conduct research at the in Switzerland. The for , published in 2014. Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella is part of the permanent collection of the 'Pataphysical Museum at The London Institute of 'Pataphysics. The for . Fordham University's for , published in 2009.
Quantum poetics
Projects in quantum poetics from 2015-2018 include , , and . In 2015, Catanzano wrote a series of essays about the intersections of poetry and science in a at Jacket2. In 2012, Gilbert Adair curated a feature in Jacket2, , that collects dialogues between contemporary poets who share an interest in science. These poets were Rae Armantrout, Amy Catanzano, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack. An essay in four sections, by Catanzano appeared from 2009 to 2011 in Jerome Rothenberg's . In it she says of quantum poetics: "By applying principles in theoretical physics to poetry, quantum poetics investigates how physical reality is assumed, imagined, and tested through language at discernible and indiscernible scales of spacetime."
