Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

Sometime the most interesting thing about a collection is the conceit behind it. The back cover blurb explains that the Italian girl “haunting” the poet takes her name from the newly-discovered, rarest naturally occurring element in Earth’s crust. Its distinguishing feature is, along with the fact that it is incredibly radioactive, its astonishingly short half-life. The longest isotope sticks around for 8 hours, the shortest vaporizes itself in seconds. This was all new knowledge to me when I started reading the book.

This book swings from Virgil to Tao and on the surface the poems here are mostly unconnected? The thread of these poems as a collection is hard to follow? I spent a bit of time pondering, meditating on, the book and re-reading sections as I prepared this micro-review. This is not an easy book. It requires a bit of work. Gracefully though, Michael hands us the key to the whole thing right around the middle of the book. I’ve copied the passage I’m talking about below. The poet is the Physicist, looking for accidents to throw us together. We are the radioactive decay. The damage.

If you follow me over on BlueSky you already know that I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. Here is a bonus excerpt for you this week from the long-ish poem “Astatine.” These four stanzas pretty much sum up the entire book.

She is here. Sleeping.
Skinny young crows scream and scream.
I will not seek her.

Physicists meet her,
show her the damage,
the rebuilding.

They pray at the fire.
She weeps for the dead
on our small hill.

In meditation.
I look for accidents to
hurl us together.