Particle and Wave
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Are we alone? If so, Particle and Wave insists that we need not be lonely. Here the periodic table of elements—a system familiar to many of us from high school chemistry—unfolds in a series of unexpected meanings with connotations public, personal, and existential. Based on a logic that considers the atomic symbol an improvised phoneme, Particle and Wave is keenly attuned to the qualities of voice and concerned with how these improvisations fall on the listening ear. From the most recent housing bust, to the artistic visions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, to the labors of the Curies, to Pliny the Younger’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius, culture and world histories are recontextualized through the lens of personal experience. Muscular, precise, structurally varied, and imagistic, these poems engage in lyricism yet resist mere confession. In doing so they project the self as a composite, speaking in a variety of registers, from the nursery rhyme songster, to the ascetic devotee, to the unapologetic sensualist. They welcome all comers and elbow the bounded physical world to make way for a dynamic, new subjectivity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"We need new art," Landry asserts in his debut collection, "And I don't mean a resin toilet./ And I don't mean another naked conversation with the artist." He continues in manifesto-like tone: "The children whose work it is/ to take apart CPUs/ demand new meaning,/ new treatment." In poems named for elements in the periodic table, Landry shifts freely but delicately from image to image, like the "painter of bottles" who works with "brushes/ of eyelash." Throughout the poems, selves are fluid and the distinctions between "I," "we," and "you" are blurred or effaced object becoming subject; subject, object. "We arose from each other in a scattering of articles a, the, an definite bodies in the indefinite morning." Just as the book's title underscores the power of observation light becoming particle when observed directly; as a wave, indirectly readers might observe that a poetry mimicking the essentially arbitrary movement of elemental particles might be, in itself, also essentially meaningless: "Ghosts full of advice," he writes, in Silicon, "appeared among the villagers.// The mountain sloughed minerals,/ altering the coast." But when energy does not escape from his fissions and fusions, Landry succeeds in creating a new lyricism of the magical and the absurd.
