Carslaw's Sequences: Poems

by Lisa M. Steinman

Lisa M. Steinman takes the title of her new book of poems from the world of mathematics. Horatio Scott Carslaw was an early twentieth-century mathematician who worked on divergent series‹ series of numbers that cannot be tidily summed. And while this is something of a problem for mathematicians, it is potentially a delight for poets. Steinman adopts divergent series as "a nicely untidy metaphor for the way we put together linguistic gestures and talismanic anecdotes as means of locating and identifying ourselves and making sense of the worlds we inhabit." Her book creates a "public space" where a patchwork of various languages and cultural sites resonate with one another, raising such issues as how we define ourselves to ourselves and others; how we can or cannot use public languages to do this; how, most simply, we find things "add up" in multiple, variable ways.

74 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2003