Note how Smith plays with scale, moving effortlessly from microcosm to macrocosm and back again. So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamedįor all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. Smith writes at the conclusion of her much-heralded poem, “My God It’s Full of Stars”:
So with the microscope, as with the telescope what is disclosed by technology is just another look at ourselves. That Smith’s father was a working scientist probably led her away from the panic of an Allen Ginsberg staring down “Moloch” or the nostalgia of a Toni Morrison missing the emotional intensities of prewar neighborhood life, but I also imagine Smith’s literary influences must have had something to do with it too in this book, she alludes often to cinematic science fiction, and in interviews she has named Emily Dickinson as an early inspiration. Your context changes how you read any given book, and I was reading this in the context of course on contemporary American literature, wherein it struck me as the first and only text we read-whether in poetry, prose, or comics, whether by writers male, female, gay, straight, black, white, Native American or Asian American-to present a non-apocalyptic view of science and technology. poet laureate is her elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble telescope. This celebrated 2011 volume from the current U.S.
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