Shimmer

A book of inquiry, Mark Irwin's Shimmer queries how the worlds of poverty, terrorism, ecology, species extinction, mortality and race interface and affect one another through electronic reproduction and transmission. Not as spectacles but as events that often seem too familiar, many are featured on YouTube: a horse still alive, dragged to be slaughtered; a homeless mother with an infant; a terrorist disguising a bomb, a Vietnam veteran attempting to commit suicide, a mother, unable to speak, who communicates by drawing different colors.

Shimmer explores those places where metropolis and the natural world collide, where virtual technology attempts to convey the spirit. The incursion of electronic communication throughout society as a form of human language, has radically distorted and impacted notions of form and space in contemporary poetry, just as it has impacted the idea of what it means to be human.