Supergiants

For millennia humanity has looked upwards and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward. In Supergiants, we turn this gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, these poems reorient the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Supergiants shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Paperback
Wolsak & Wynn
2025
978-1-998408-14-6
$20

Wolsak & Wynn

Paperback
Wolsak & Wynn
2025
978-1-998408-14-6
$20

Wolsak & Wynn

Endorsements

"Kyle Flemmer revels in the language of astronomy and the names we pin on celestial objects like flags on the Moon – but goes beyond wordplay to ‘transcription of the human element.’ In sequences like Astral Projection and Stellar Sequence, he maps correspondences between scientific concepts and our other thought patterns – mythological, political and personal. Deeply inventive and thought-provoking."

— Alice Major, author of Welcome to the Anthropocene and Knife on Snow

"The bright and inventive constellations of Flemmer’s poems bend ho-hum literary space-time with texts infused by both light and gravity, delicacy and resonance, intelligence and wit, and transmit the alienness, tenderness and wonder of what it is to find oneself an earthling and already living in the future."

— Gary Barwin, author of Scandal at the Alphorn Factory and Yiddish for Pirates

Gallery

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Publication History

Early versions of these poems have appeared in a variety of print and digital publications. Thank you to the editors of above/ground press, Dusie, h&, No Press, Penteract Press, Spacecraft Press, Touch the Donkey, Trouble Among the Stars and the University of Calgary Press. Thanks also to the Calgary Institute for the Humanities for inviting me to perform some of these poems at their Annual Community Forum in 2022 and again at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory in 2025.