Product Description
Using chemistry as an indexing trope, Jordie Albiston tabulates the human predicament of love: its foundations and fundamentals; its configuration of emotions; its recurring properties; and its inherent assumption of many as yet unknown elements to occur. These poems range across space and time, all the while adhering to the formal constraints of atomic theory. The states and structures of being are scrutinised according to love’s capacity for passion and fissure, blessing and debt, and a compound body of two is progressively mapped onto the page.
This remarkable collection sees Albiston’s longstanding conversation with mathematics and poetic form advance into the realm of science. With characteristic invention, orchestration and play, she discovers and describes the universal vastness and everyday physics of love.
Listen to audio of Jordie reading selections from this book. http://auspoetaudio.szikla.com/jordie_albiston/
REVIEWS
“The opening of Albiston’s Element: The atomic weight & radius of love reads free and skipping. She has a nimble sense of the poem’s sounds in sync with the words’ rhythms, the vocal cords engaged from the lips to the curled licks of the tongue on teeth, to clicks at the back of the throat.” LUKE BEESLEY, Australian Book Review (paywalled)
“It’s impossible not to admire how Albiston…is able to find, via both scientific and aleatory means, a new way of making a particular love (literally) universal…For a ‘‘scientific’’ book Element is extraordinarily lyrical, reflecting perhaps one of its epigraphs — George Meredith’s dictum that ‘the man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong’.” GEOFF PAGE, The Sydney Morning Herald (paywalled)
“Albiston’s recent collection ignited my dormant synapses in so many ways: firstly, a reacquaintance with the periodic table, then, how matter at the most fundamental scale can be purified with poetic discourse, and finally, a revised understanding of relationship and love, one that is built from substance…there is that inextricable bind of atomic radius and weight with metaphor, chemical reaction and creation.” ANGELA COSTI, Rochford Street Review
