What kind of society can put a flag onto the moon but can’t keep that flag from falling over? What is humanity, that we seem to see ourselves across the skies? What is a poem, and is it okay to print it in Courier?

Kyle Flemmer’s hilarious, rollicking, provocative, space-themed poetry collection, Supergiants, is an exploration, a long-running joke, a shock wave generated by rapid mental expansion. Flemmer uses remix and sampling, visual and typographic elements, and procedural methods to concoct the book’s five major sequences: “Modular Systems,” “Lunar Flag Assembly Kit,” “Astral Projection,” “Coronagraphic,” and “Stellar Sequence.” Here the poet serves up such delights as text-free “visual sonnets,” whimsical diagrammatics, and rearrangements of found text from NASA and from Carl Sagan. Readers are also offered a helpful “Basic Vocabulary for Subsequent Reading,” itemizing such necessary terms as “curved  connective  space  eclipse, /  annular  star  latitude  index, /  object  W  elliptic  motion  system” (p. 11). None of these terms will necessarily come up later in the text, nor are we given definitions or any contextual information, but still—a tone is set. Indeed, this vocabulary list is followed by the purely visual “Space Achievements” in which constellations appear to fall into the sun, rockets give way to cloud formations, and a parachute descends toward a teensy mountain range in a bizarre concatenation of scales.

Flemmer isn’t a physicist, and neither am I, seeing as I’m a grad school dropout. But my undergraduate and half a Master’s degree were in that field, and I spent three summers doing student research in space physics. I can be pretty darn picky about the mishandling of scientific concepts in art and literature. In particular, I’ve little patience for vague gestures at poorly comprehended quantum phenomena, or the pseudo-profound tossing around of evocative terminology divorced from its precise, technical usage. Somehow, though, Supergiants gets past my radar. The sheer playfulness of the work makes mincemeat of any pretension to accuracy. Clearly the science itself is not the point. At the same time, the materials are well sourced. Nothing strikes me as actually wrong in a technical sense, though perhaps we’re in the territory of things that are so unscientific as to be “not even wrong,” in the phrase attributed anecdotally to Wolfgang Pauli. At any rate, I’m happy to give the book’s physics a pass.

So what of the verse? Flemmer is a digital media artist as well as a poet and publisher. While Supergiants is his first trade paperback publication, he is the author of several pamphlets of visual and experimental poetry, including some in which early versions of material in Supergiants made its first appearance, much of which is freely available on his website. Microcosmos (2023), for example, is an online image gallery inscribed in a block chain, addressing the question, “How can the largest cosmic structures fit into the tiniest file size?” The chapbook Coronagraphic (2018) previews the visual sonnet sequence in Supergiants, making use of images from a star atlas grouped around sets of fourteen randomly selected celestial coordinates. Here “[l]ines of sight … substitute for lines of text in each sonnet.”

Experimental literature can have enormous appeal for readers who eschew sentiment and delight in novelty, but it is not without its pitfalls and problematics. Wayde Compton, in his Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics (2024), cites a 2013 Maclean’s article by Anthony A. Davis in which Canadian conceptual poet Christian Bök expresses his amazement “that poets will continue to write about their divorces, even though there is currently a robot taking pictures of orange ethane lakes on Titan.” Compton challenges this valorization of innovation as defined by a pointedly technical and culturally specific lineage, noting that practitioners see “innovation […] as the good in and of itself; their imagination is technical rather than socially relational, and so their skills at doing relational imaginative work are blunted.”

Flemmer, while not necessarily discussing divorce per se, does make room for grandmothers, goddesses, sisters, and friends. The “Astral Projection” sequence projects aspects of Flemmer’s female relatives and other close connections onto “families” of asteroids. The characters of assorted mythological figures are also invoked in relation to astronomical naming conventions. Throughout this collection, then, the unruly human element asserts itself with shouts and pratfalls. The long sequence “Lunar Flag Assembly Kit” is a chronicle of accomplishments and failures in the raising of the American flag on the lunar surface in 1969. First, “a flag / planted in the Sea of Tranquility 8.2 m from the LM / is blown over by exhaust from Eagle’s takeoff” (p. 17); then “the LFA kit is / deployed and though it weighs 6x less on the Moon / its horizontal latch pole fails to support the flag” (p. 19); and so it goes, and so it goes, with the texture of the pieces visibly degrading from page to page.

In “Stellar Sequence,” astronomical bodies are mapped onto human archetypes, whose tragic flaws and unstable behaviours escalate toward total disaster. In this sequence’s “Yellow Dwarfs,” for instance, “Causation / Becomes a religious occupation, // Fusion our respite / From the Kingdom of Darkness” (p. 81). But darkness encroaches. The titular stars of “Yellow Hypergiants” bear a distinct resemblance to certain social-media-loving, crypto-holding billionaires. “Black Holes” bring us to a Dantean centre where “end times come to countries without emigrants, / Their searing tongues lick obscene at the altar of ape // Familiars,” and we face “[y]our naked maw like the supermassive / Suck of an entry wound” (p. 87).

You don’t have to like poetry to enjoy such a compendium of curiosities. In fact, a book such as this one may provide an excellent point of reentry, showing just how vast and strange is the potential universe of poetic forms. A lot has happened in poetry since Wordsworth last looked at a daffodil, as a lot has happened in the exploration of space and science. Supergiants is more fun than a barrel of astronaut chimps, and Flemmer a rogue tour guide for a cosmic voyage. It’s well worth signing on for the ride.