Lost City Hydrothermal Field

by Peter Milne Greiner

Overview

Drawing on the work of such thinkers as John McPhee, Rachel Carson, Timothy Morton, Frank White, and others, LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD explores philosophies of nature old and new through poetry and science fiction. The anthropocene crisis and the crisis of humanity-as-invasive-species are framed in this text as global, as well as personal, misadventures. A mixed-genre work, readers encounter poems and stories-islands and continents-in a rapid succession of speculative geography, and readers are invited to join its beleaguered, psychozoic populations.

"Peter Milne Greiner's poems range widely across space, time, and cultural history-from the Magna Carta to The Little Mermaid, from the pyramids to the astronomical observatory at Mauna Kea-and catch up in their full-throttle trajectory a universe of detail about the nature of things. Indeed, the poet's brooding over the fate of Geena Davis as well as that of 'lame dystopias' suggests nothing so much as Lucretius's epic enterprise: 'I mine human doing, ' Greiner declares, 'for all its garish hyper objects.' By deploying a language alert to figurative provocation that's sharpened by a tautly disjunctive syntax, Greiner uncovers the apocalypse in the quotidian and raises everyday life to fearsome implication." -Albert Mobilio

"LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL FIELD is in the world, but it's not of it. Peter Milne Greiner is the voice of the cosmic mundane-sublime, real, and existentially funny." -Claire L. Evans

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Hopping the Imaginary's Obscure Islands An OS [re: con]versation with Peter Milne Greiner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946031112
Publisher:	Operating System
Publication date:	10/11/2017
Pages:	111
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Peter Milne Greiner's work has been featured in Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Fence, SciArt Magazine, and elsewhere, and has been lauded by the likes of Jeff VanderMeer and Claire L. Evans. He studied poetry at The New School under Sekou Sundiata, and is a scholar of the history of the Roaring Forties. In July of 2013 he sent a poem into space through the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel Valley, California. He is the author of the chapbook Executive Producer Chris Carter. LOST CITY HYDROTHERMAL Field is his first full length collection.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/18/2017
Greiner tours a series of dystopias and alternate realities with infectious linguistic verve in his uncanny and wonderful debut. Wandering amid invented landscapes, the poet introduces such cleverly named locations as the “Topiary of Terror,” an American bar in Reykjavik, and the “Chapel of Her Divine Counterfeit Brain Tissue.” Greiner frequently asserts himself as the reluctant hero of some strange quest; for example, he must “turn over a non-leaf and lift/ the spacerock from the heart’s bitter peninsulas” in order to appease the “God of tardigrades.” In one of several excursions into prose, Greiner imagines himself living in the wreck of a cruise ship amid a perpetual hurricane; in another, he draws preposterous associative links between the lost continent of Atlantis and Mariah Carey’s Super Bowl performance of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” His ingenious metaphors include “Your gaze like steady impersonal drone footage/ writes a San Andreas fault through my center.” What resonates is the collection’s vast loneliness—that of the last man on Earth roaming the countryside in search of life. What sets this collection apart from other speculative poetry, aside from its exceptional quality, is Greiner’s way of moving through time, somehow visiting both origin and culmination, the primordial and the apocalyptic, and demonstrating their interchangeability. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly