Matrix floored by The Hayflick Limit

Coach House Books' poetry books are relentlessly cool. And Matthew Tierney's The Hayflick Limit is one such cool book. The surface of the poems uses tactical, mathematical precision to assemble references to high-low cultures and everything in between. It is centred in a Torontonian consciousness and displays a similitude with that city, while being far from limited by that fact; quite the reverse, it studies the world writ large with a probing, at-times scientific eye. While this breadth risks making it a book with relatively little feel, the guiding notion of the Hayflick limit brings its poetic arc more and more together as it progresses. The Hayflick limit refers to the scientific limit to the number of times that human cells can reproduce before their DNA becomes irreparably damaged. The limit determines that the theoretical maximum human lifespan is around a hundred and twenty years, and suggest that every time a cell divides it moves towards greater corruption ...

... There is, however, a streak of self-effacement that emerges in the different voices of the book, as well as a sardonic wit that undercuts seriousness through, for instance, a sequence of poems that catalogue a variety of unlikely phobias. But The Hayflick Limit returns to mortality, to the fact that humans seem to accumulate regrets and errors rather than improve upon themselves as time passes. At times funny, often strident, Matthey Tierney's second book is an accomplished effort.