THE CLOUD VERSUS GRAND UNIFICATION THEORY

ECW Press, 88 pages, $18.95 In his fourth collection, Waterloo poet Chris Banks reflects on life in the age of social media and rapid technological advances such as cloning (“the shrine/of the genome has been broken into,” he writes in the wryly titled opening poem “Progress”). The poem ramps up into a tongue- in-cheek paean to the possibilities of science (“What would/you want if you could simply overhaul your genes/with a microinjection?”) but then circles back to the virtues of ordinary, flawed intimacy, “the imperfect perfect.” His meditations on the contemporary world are set against bittersweet poems in which he looks back on his younger years (“Memory is a mixtape. Hit playback,” he writes.) There’s a fluid, conversational ease to Banks’s heartfelt meditations, as well a sense of urgency; as he ponders our “time of mass extinctions and exorbitant/debt,” he longs for poetry to be “a kind of ark/ to float above it all.”