Code by Charlotte Pence

These poems transport—a wonderful break from 2020. Poems of travel, transformation. They connect to the real but make the real something more. Impactful, important. There’s an extra gift: Pence includes some poems from a late friend. Including these poems, and a short essay to the reader setting them up, is itself a kind of poetry, so elegant and connective. And so this part of the book becomes a love poem to a dead friend, who herself was writing a love poem to a dead mother. There is a series of poems about genetics (hence the title of the collection). It works! There are two short essays. Both, like poems, focus on scenes to expand understanding of something larger than ourselves. The fit well into the book of poems, giving them some context, and breaking the sections like palette cleansers.

From “The Weight of the Sun”

I like the 4 a.m. feedings best, tilting
the rocking chair back and forth
with my toes, observing how the invisible 

lines of our dark yard rest against
the lines of other yards—of other lives. 

Before the sun rises, this small wedge 

of the world momentarily in agreement: 

everyone on this block wishing for sleep, 

for peace, for the coming day to be better 

than the last. . .

From ““DNA’s Main Role is the Long-Term Storage of Information””

the geneticist writes. Then stops. Very elegant, 

one of her lab workers said of the double helix.

The geneticist cannot help but think: Yes. DNA 

is a whirl, a twist, a woman who will not have a seagull 

crap on her shoulder as she accepts a glass of wedding 

champagne. The drink tilted but never spilling.