University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-8229-6516-9 | eISBN: 978-0-8229-8316-3 Library of Congress Classification PS3614.O7325A6 2017 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Best Bones, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in national journals such as AGNI, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and she is the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Nordgren is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Cincinnati.
REVIEWS
"This striking and inventive second collection from Nordgren reads as if a naturalist's observational notebooks found a second, wondrous life as poetry."
—Publishers Weekly
“Mythology and evolutionary science, intellectual and popular culture, microorganisms and dinosaurs, Eros and illness—these pairings play off each other throughout the book, to highlight another powerful pair: pathos and ambivalence. What is being considered here? That our desire for knowledge is both necessary and presumptuous? Perhaps, but I think the deeper recognition is the human tendency to order the world according to our own perspective. The poems in this sparkling book make it abundantly clear that such a perspective has stark limits, and the order we think we prefer might indeed be missing the point of existence.”
—Maurice Manning
“Nordgren interrogates the accumulation of humankind’s scientific knowledge and concludes, correctly and poetically, that ‘our world/ is vast, but vanishingly small.’ As she observes the collisions between science and the material world, including the deeply unknowable Feminine, she convinces us that data can be seen as, interestingly enough, a metaphor for spirit. Read this astonishingly original collection and be edified and amazed. And grateful for this fine literary report from the field by such a keenly intelligent observer of our grand human experiment.”
—Sidney Wade
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Ghost Lessons
Origin of Species
A Report from Our Team in the Field
Mitochondrial Eve
Darwin’s Mother
Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory
An Uncontacted Tribe
The Weed
Darwin’s Mother
Iguanodon
Breeders
The Anatomist
Mother, Pressed
Darwin’s Mother
Virtus et Scientia
Life without a Spine
Material
Material
Reservoir
Pillar of Fire by Night
Cicada
The Cell
Fly
Tick
Pregnancy
Blue Poem
The Outer Crust
Behind My Bright Eye
The Network
This Valley
Animal Space
A Moral Animal
About Us
The Kiss
Moral Animal
Achilles and Mary at the Museum
Electromagnetic
Simulation
Movie Night
Monster
Mostly as I Am
Goddesses
The Ghoasts
The Box My Mother Keeps
Vaka eller Sova
Hawaii
Addendum
Mindfile
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017 Paper: 978-0-8229-6516-9 eISBN: 978-0-8229-8316-3
In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Best Bones, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in national journals such as AGNI, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and she is the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Nordgren is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Cincinnati.
REVIEWS
"This striking and inventive second collection from Nordgren reads as if a naturalist's observational notebooks found a second, wondrous life as poetry."
—Publishers Weekly
“Mythology and evolutionary science, intellectual and popular culture, microorganisms and dinosaurs, Eros and illness—these pairings play off each other throughout the book, to highlight another powerful pair: pathos and ambivalence. What is being considered here? That our desire for knowledge is both necessary and presumptuous? Perhaps, but I think the deeper recognition is the human tendency to order the world according to our own perspective. The poems in this sparkling book make it abundantly clear that such a perspective has stark limits, and the order we think we prefer might indeed be missing the point of existence.”
—Maurice Manning
“Nordgren interrogates the accumulation of humankind’s scientific knowledge and concludes, correctly and poetically, that ‘our world/ is vast, but vanishingly small.’ As she observes the collisions between science and the material world, including the deeply unknowable Feminine, she convinces us that data can be seen as, interestingly enough, a metaphor for spirit. Read this astonishingly original collection and be edified and amazed. And grateful for this fine literary report from the field by such a keenly intelligent observer of our grand human experiment.”
—Sidney Wade
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Ghost Lessons
Origin of Species
A Report from Our Team in the Field
Mitochondrial Eve
Darwin’s Mother
Dr. Harry Harlow’s Primate Laboratory
An Uncontacted Tribe
The Weed
Darwin’s Mother
Iguanodon
Breeders
The Anatomist
Mother, Pressed
Darwin’s Mother
Virtus et Scientia
Life without a Spine
Material
Material
Reservoir
Pillar of Fire by Night
Cicada
The Cell
Fly
Tick
Pregnancy
Blue Poem
The Outer Crust
Behind My Bright Eye
The Network
This Valley
Animal Space
A Moral Animal
About Us
The Kiss
Moral Animal
Achilles and Mary at the Museum
Electromagnetic
Simulation
Movie Night
Monster
Mostly as I Am
Goddesses
The Ghoasts
The Box My Mother Keeps
Vaka eller Sova
Hawaii
Addendum
Mindfile
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE