AustLit

'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.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is not a book of high mathematics: rather, an attempt to migrate some of the innate robustness, austerity and elegance of Euclidean thought into the realm of poetic structure. Albiston's formal experiments do not function as mere theory, dry equation or games, but authentic poetic events, at the same time harmoniously familiar, and strange' (Introduction)

'The letter 'm' is emblematic of recurrence and precipitousness in these poems. They emerge with the wantonness of sensations in everyday life. In this case three lives: maternal grandmother, paternal great-great grandmother and the poet. Jordie Albiston, with characteristic delicacy and zest, limns these very different women as perspectives to each other.

Recurrence is intrinsic to sonnets. They are patterned internally, and are often paroxysmal: a perfect form and formation for poems which worry the distinction between the fatal and the banal.

The sequence tells what happens when you admit the existential into everyday life, in small or large doses. The results can be desolate, or sublime. And comedic as well: Albiston knows how to play between darkness and send-up, when it comes to an arduous and animating tension between body and mind.' (Publisher's blurb)