The Hayflick Limit earns four stars from Eye Weekly

In The Hayflick Limit (****), Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight, even telling a full story or two. 'The day after his wife left him,' Tierney writes, 'Charles found a bucket of antimatter / in the basement. He was rummaging for / their wedding album, packed away / in the canvas suitcase, years back.' After explaining the genesis of this very important bucket of antimatter, Tierney concludes: 'Charles hugged / the bucket to his chest and wept / a last time. So lucky / to have found it. Coldness / seeping through his ribcage towards / the simple matter of his heart.' Tierney is also capable of seeing the infinite in Spirographs ('Paths to nowhere. The chill comes / at the never-end of forever, tingle.') and the poetry trapped in Area 51 ('Fence, tire marks, / graffiti bleed. / The rest, those saccadic bits / our rods and cones pass over, are alien ephemera'). Call it science fiction for the melancholic.