A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes

A striking poetic debut that brilliantly illuminates and celebrates the intersection of poetry and science, and the ways they can mediate our discovery of the world and our place in it.
     Originating from her living room, backyard garden, university office, or the field sites in boreal or tropical forests, the poems in Madhur Anand’s captivating debut collection compose a lyric science; they bring order and chaos together into a unified theory of predicting catastrophes, large and small. Anand’s ecologist poetics are sophisticated and original; her voice is an “index,” a way of cataloguing and measuring the world and human experience, and of illuminating the interconnectedness at the heart of all things. Narrating the beauty of her perceived world, the poems unabashedly embrace the scintillant language of scientific evidence as they interrogate crises of personal and global concern. The result is a poetry that is as complex as it is compassionate. Anand’s modernist intervention into “nature” poetry is a sparkling addition to poetics in Canada and beyond.

MADHUR ANAND’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines across North America and in the anthology The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes was published by McClelland & Stewart in April 2015 to international acclaim. "Anand's attention to and ability to evoke explicit, exponential beauty in scientific and natural form are simply stunning" (Publishers Weekly). Anand completed her Ph.D. in theoretical ecology at Western University, and is currently a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of Guelph and interim Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation.