“Starlight in Two Million is a neo-hippie, alternative-future creation myth in which space-time limitations disappear and characters forge ever-developing notions of freedom, responsibility, and relationship, in settings of nowhere and everywhere. Catanzano comes across as a superstring theoretical linguist sensualist geek collagist, with instincts to parse, to layer, and to linger, in dynamic context or in contextual dynamism. A poetic attempt at the elusive Theory of Everything? Her work feels important, and full of wonder for what is and what could be. Scientists and artists share this.”


—Cindra Halm, Rain Taxi Review of Books

COVER ART by Vance Kirkland (1904-1981), Four Suns in Space (1971), oil on linen, 75” x 139”

RECIPIENT OF THE NOEMI PRESS BOOK AWARD in fiction


Included in the permanent collection of the ’Pataphysical Museum
London Institute of ’Pataphysics


Cross-Genre: Fiction / Poetry


Available at independent bookstores and:

NOEMI PRESS | SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION | BARNES & NOBLE | AMAZON


“Amy Catanzano's ‘neo-scientific’ novella is a metafictional tour de force: a tour of the forces that compose the cosmos, a recomposition of the music of the spheres. Here, narrative flow becomes a kind of quantum fluid, bifurcating into character systems and poetry. Tinctures of the inhuman spread through this writing, causing language to convulse in forms as vivid and varied as the multiverse itself. Alternately explosive and meditative, at once lyrical and conceptual, Catanzano’s work renews the pataphysical claim of literature on science. In this work, American literature has found its own [Alfred] Jarry.”


—Andrew Joron

“Amy Catanzano’s writing is a vector, releasing sparks. To read her work is to emit/receive—something. From a distant yet intimate point. What will happen next? Where will you go? This novella is a guidebook to a future that has not arrived yet. To ‘predicate.’ To ‘devolve.’ To ‘shimmer.’ In a book that is a like a nerve.”


—Bhanu Kapil

“This text is a scientific experiment. It moves language in new directions…[and]…challenges the boundaries and rules of language and literature through experimentation on all levels: perspective, time, form, literary genre, and scientific genre.”

—Jace Brittain and Rachel Zavecz
Queen Mob’s Teahouse

Amy Catanzano with the painting used for the front and back cover of Starlight in Two Million, Vance Kirkland’s Four Suns in Space, Denver Art Museum

Amy Catanzano with the painting used for the front and back cover of Starlight in Two Million, Vance Kirkland’s Four Suns in Space, Denver Art Museum