Reviews
"The poems in Quiver reverberate with the ravishing and harrowing erotics of the natural world as they consider first and last things, figure and ground, the visible and reticent. In the nineteenth century, a prophetic Whitman sang the body electric. Here, in a powerfully imaginative group of poems on the Curies, radium opens its mouth 'to crow / the dawn atomic.' Such richly observant poems 'glow in the small moments,' even as they take on the largest subjects. Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is a marvelously intelligent poet, attentive to the possibilities of nature and language, the reciprocity of all that is. "
—Alice Fulton, author of Cascade Experiment
Description
At the crossroads of science, mathematics, and art lives Quiver, a stunning collection of poems that seeks to reconcile the empirical truths of science with the emotional truths of human experience. Through an ambitious set of poetic series and sequences, Somers-Willett reinvents the love poem, rendering an exquisite world where the graph of a mathematical equation can become the image of “love’s witness / running with its arms open all the way home.” With a deft, meditative sense of music, Quiver reveals a relationship between science and human sentiment that is as surprising as it is profound.
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Paper List price: Your price: 3/15/2009 |
Susan B. A. Somers-Willett is the author of a book of poetry, Roam, and a book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. She is an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University.
