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Viral Suite explores our relationship with self, other, environment, space, and time. The sensual and the cerebral. How the we/here/now is evolving and mutating with each downloaded packet.
Praise for Viral Suite:
"The poems in Viral Suite are exuberant in their exploration of the body as 'a vast zone of sensation,' including a palpable face-to-face throat singing with the poem as a body, proprioceptive and linguistic, and always right in front of us. Mari-Lou Rowley takes us down a homeo path of scientific and poetic lyric in an amazement of molecular dance through the lush genetics of life on the move. Very contagious stuff." (Fred Wah)
"The sciencing of language and the figurative elaboration of science in Viral Suite give the book an honest, raw energy. Rowley's destinations are various and startling, but in grappling with our precarious grasp on the world, she comes, literally, to terms." (Vallum)
"It is rare to see science and poetry mixed as seamlessly as they are in Mari-Lou Rowley's Viral Suite, but not surprising for Rowley, a science and technology writer. The linguistic gymnastics and energy of the verse is at its best when she combines the world of physics, mathematics and molecular biology with real physicality; as in the third section, Elucidata.' Visceral gems such as Sex in Space Time' allow language and image to do their work without interference from the empirical voice, For the same reason the earth revolves around/ the sun, a hand falling through any arc of/ air will choose the swelling mass of thigh/ over nothing, for warmth/ for meaning.'" (This Magazine)
Viral Suite has been incorporated into university curricula in North America and Europe
Mari-Lou Rowley was born in Edmonton and raised in Saskatoon. She worked in advertising and marketing in Edmonton and Toronto before moving to Vancouver in 1993, where she completed an MA in SFU's Graduate Liberal Studies Program. Mari-Lou is principal of Pro-Textual Communications, and her clients include UBC, the City of Vancouver, Science World, and others. Much of poetry is shaped by her work as a science and technology writer, as she incorporates the concepts of the language of science into her own writing. Previous books include 'Interference with the Hydrangea' (Thistledown Press, 2003), and 'a Knife a Rope a Book' (Underwhich Editions, 1990), and the chapbooks 'CatoptRomancer' and 'Boreal Surreal'.