Author: Arthur Smith
Author info: Professor of English
Publication Date: February 2013
Publisher: Carnegie Mellon
Synopsis: From the opening poem, we follow a narrator through the loss of an Edenic life and its manifestations, from personal loss to the extinction of species and–looming in the future–the threat of our own extinction. In the process we range from the microscopic to the cosmic, from the worlds of literature, science, culture, politics, and religion. The source of this poetry book’s title is the observation of a Nobel Laureate in physics, who said, “We live in the fortunate era… in which there is matter.” These poems are made of both familiar and elegantly spinning insight, real as rock.