Incidents of Scattering

Poetry. INCIDENTS OF SCATTERING explores the poem as site of scientific inquiry and the stuff of science as domain of poetic inquiry. The poems manifest a rich literature of observation--the Victorian John Tyndall's studies of glaciers moving, contemporary discoveries from micro-sound to Earth- like planets near other suns, what the poet herself reports--ordered and illuminated in her voice. They bear the minute and the mammoth, the details of sound and surface, the heat of love and the cool of dispute. Each poem addresses the beloved as the very process of seeing, wondering, touching, putting into song. "Let's begin with the simplest facts: 'Dust & your body'--how the body must also revert to that from which it came. Such is the cosmic equation at the very heart of Karen Lepri's wonderful debut, INCIDENTS OF SCATTERING. Lepri takes the self as 'fig. I,' subjectivity's iota that necessitates the existence of a world and others in it. As in myth, the erotic reveals itself as a cosmogonic principle, and the work of the poem is nothing less than to discover the laws of this world. In returning to Victorian science, Lepri attends to an ever-diminishing point in which a fact returns to the ether and makes itself available for something stranger than description: that cycle of poetic vitality in which our effort to categorize transforms into wonder's staggering forms of attention. I might call Lepri's discovery 'empirical intimacy.'"--Dan Beachy-Quick