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ABOUT TERMINAL HUMAN VELOCITY

A woman leaps from the Empire State Building but falls only a single floor before she is blown back inside. So begins Christina Olson’s second collection of poetry, a rollicking, richly imagined mosaic that pits science, history, and fate against one another in an attempt try to answer the bedeviling questions of cause and effect: Do we have power over the events of our lives, or are other forces at work? Who or what is in control? Terminal Human Velocity is a steady-voiced, multi-faced narrative of the human condition, mythic yet modern—keenly inquisitive, never complacent, and ceaselessly compelling.

PRAISE FOR TERMINAL HUMAN VELOCITY

"It is always a pleasure to read poems beyond the scope of one’s usual aesthetics and to not only enjoy them, but to be gobsmacked by the surprising engines that make them run: a cop show, sensational news stories, a Christmas party attended by infectious diseases. As Christina Olson writes in her beguiling second collection, 'sometimes there is real sadness' in a world that can feel very unreal much of the time. Thank the stars in our modern, satellite-pocked heavens for Christina Olson’s poems, and the chills they give us as we contemplate what comforts are left."
—Keetje Kuipers, author of Beautiful in the Mouth and The Keys to the Jail

“Whether engaging songbirds as last suppers, velvet worms who rove among ‘lost cocktail napkins,’ or superheroes with a penchant for drinking too much red wine, the poems in Christina Olson’s brilliant new collection endlessly surprise, inventing fresh ways to braid the absurd with the quotidian, the hilarious with the heartbreaking, an obsession with the natural world with the irresistible urge to turn inward toward the heart.  Here, pain can be jarred, getting out of bed in the morning can be the ultimate punk rock act, and marriage can only be understood via the lens of a re-defined evolution. Miraculously, in Olson’s impossibly wonderful world, the boundaries between the internal and external are ever-revised, and we lucky readers wander this landscape wherein every blessed romantic thing gets refurbished, and stumbles around, bemused, beating with an urgent, exhilarating, and altogether new vitality.”
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of The Mad Feast and Preparing the Ghost

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christina Olson is the author of the collection Before I Came Home Naked (Ankylosaurus Press, 2012) and the chapbooks Weird Science (Paper Nautilus, 2016) and Rook & The M.E. (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015). Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Brevity, River Styx, Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Normal School, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. She teaches creative writing at Georgia Southern University.

For more news and press, check out Christina’s website, or find her online @olsonquest