Matrix

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.

The world of Miss Lamp is one densely filled with conundrums. A story in vignettes, the reader is taken from present to past, experiencing the life of Miss Lamp, a Young Miss Lamp, and a Young Young Miss Lamp. Along the journey we are introduced to a cast of characters who provide for a little illumination into the true nature of the protagonist.