In Accelerated Silence by Brooke Matson

Brooke Matson’s In Accelerated Silence, newly released from Milkweed Editions, is heavy on the science. Which is awesome. The book is emotionally centered on the death of a partner, and the language and metaphor of sciences gives the speaker a medium through which to filter and process that loss. Instead of distancing the reader, the language puts a sense of order on the randomness of life. The subject matter itself is emotionally laden, and the objectivity of logic allows the poet to deliver the gut punch with no melancholy. The emotion is laid out for us like a scientific argument. It is the Truth. Buy here.

From “Elegy in the Form of a Pomegranate”

Eve was like that: eating a pomegranate / like smashing a chest of rubies. / She split the whole // vermillion world in a violent need to know . . .

From “Law of the Conservation of Mass”

v. Fallout

All light was once matter / and all matter shall become light. // Evening draws me back / into this bedroom, as it did on days we woke // together, when your fingers found the sheet / and pulled it the extra inch to cover // my bare shoulder. The starlings sing / at morning and evening, // the same doorway—sing / though the hollow your hips // carved on the bed has no mass / to hold its shape. I want to be folded whole // into the light that fills your space.

From “Sonnet in the Higgs Field”

I force my heft against the unseen fence / every morning just to climb out of bed / Each limb lead-heavy as if fighting tar / a drag that scientists call mass and I / call massive depression. . .