Glass Is Elastic

Glass is Elastic is a book of surfaces and reflections, mirrors and windows. What do we see - what do we know - in a world experienced through lenses and screens? ''Don''t blink. Nobody''s / looking, nobody''s seeing.'' Jon Glover explores the treachery and creativity inherent in the eye''s lens, in the eyeball itself, in a microscope or camera, in a telescope, in the mysterious properties of glass, malleable as time itself. We translate the shape of the world into maps, pixels, mathematical data; into stories that change in the telling. A central poem sequence links medicine, war and vision in the glass slides assembled in a pathology lab for research into narcolepsy after the First World War, nerves and brains laid bare as evidence, as names on a war memorial. In language that combines scientific rigour with the supple everyday, Glover surprises the reader into looking, into seeing the connections in a beautiful, frightening world.