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Infinities: Poems

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What is it like to live in the universe of modern science? Not merely to understand that universe or to teach it but to live in it. Lucille Lang Day's "Infinities" is an exploration of that question: quantum physics, the biosphere, the internal ("inner space") are all portions of her answer. Oppositins constantly threaten the dance (not the unity) of the poet's selfhood, yet it is her magic to dissolve contradiction with language. Correspondences abound: stars--the "fruit" of the sky--touch in her imagination the "fruit" of the earth: "lemons, oranges,...apples glowing / on the breakfast table." In what are surely some of the most extraordinary dramatic monologues ever written, the poet's human eroticism allows her to empathize with creatures like the stickleback ("His belly undulates. / I am mesmerized / by its redness") and the fence lizard ("He spends his days eating beetles, / sunning himself / and doing push-ups / on a fallen tree to impress me"). Yet the very same univrse which causes Day to feel a sense of ecstasy also inspires fear--a deep theme of the book: "So everything is nothing. / I may be going crazy...God / plays dice with the universe." The author glories in consciousness--which is to say, in being awake--yet "insomnia" also exists as a threat: "All eleven dimensions / of space and time exist / in my brain...I can't turn it off."

The description of Nature has always been an important aspect of California writing. In this brilliant book, Lucille Lang Day has found an entirely new way to do it. Her explorations of both human and nonhuman perspectives--of infinities and infinities--are impeccably and superbly alive. Here, even a tumor speaks: "I begin to sing. I am / a tiny siren / calling the capillaries...."