This is the result of poet's residency at a science establishment. The 170 people who worked at the establishment plus the poet-in-residence + 2 guest poets were eligible to submit. Unsurprisingly there's a mix of demotic and scientific vocabulary -
- "Our low-fat ones and zeros/ Replace the fatty longhand" p.17
- "Another's in orbit,/ tossed to space by an Atlas-V,/ blinking its bits to me by antenna" p.37
I quite liked "Reply All". "The Surfer's Path" is minor but worthwhile. "All Universes are Mathematical" looks like a computer program but isn't a legal one in the languages I know. It includes some logic. I did mathematical logic at university but that was long ago, so I don't know whether the statement is legal let alone interesting. "make_me_a_poem.m" is a legal octave/matlab program but that's all that can be said for it. I wasn't keen on "Gaia" or "What if [doesn't exist] Jupiter". "It" might be good - it's a bit beyond me. "Missal", despite its odd indentation, has some quotable passages -
- "on a journey with no Jupiter/ no planetary airbag/ behind the dash"
- "The carp have their own constellations/ but the data's dirty/ hazed by pond scum"
- "Sometimes my mind is a cleanroom/ a poem the only contaminant"
Other reviews
- Becky Varley-Winter (Sabotage reviews) (Overall, a worthwhile project, and full marks to Sidekick Books for their thoughtful presentation.)
