The evening beyond each chain-lit match seemed to crouch in the shapes of houses, then rose to play havoc in a veil of dogwoods. In among the lapses, deer stooped on their stilts to eat the tulips which, under these circumstances, turned away from the source like moths losing themselves in folded wool. Are we alone? If so, Particle and Wave insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements-a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry-unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, Particle and Wave is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to Pliny the Younger's account of the eruption of Vesuvius, culture and world histories are recontextualized through the lens of personal experience. Muscular, precise, structurally varied, and imagistic, these poems engage in lyricism yet resist mere confession. In doing so they project the self as a composite, speaking in a variety of registers, from the nursery rhyme songster, to the ascetic devotee, to the unapologetic sensualist. They welcome all comers and elbow the bounded physical world to make way for a dynamic, new subjectivity.

Book Information
ISBN 9780226096193
Author Benjamin Landry
Format Paperback
Page Count 72
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press