Science

Poetry. "Playful and smart, Emily Toder's SCIENCE is written in a limpid vernacular of sudden lacunae, jumps, and about-faces. For all the poems' contemporaneity, they are haunted by an unsaid and probably indeterminate mystical experience."—Eugene Ostashevsky

"When I was a boy, I caught a bullfrog with my grandfather, and fell in love with it. Later that day I accidentally jumped on it and killed it. My grandfather is dead now too. Twenty-eight years later, I'm still alive and reading Emily Toder, who reminds me it's not the killing we've been fearing, but the abandonment of the things that we pretend love us. Toder's poems are never wrong because they mean everything they say, like a hard science. This book should be required reading in all geometry classrooms. And by reading in, I mean death to."—Zachary Schomburg

"Soon after reading SCIENCE, you will realize you are already nostalgic for the experience. You will miss its serial astonishments. You will get caught up again in each experiment and feel grateful for each hypothesis as it solidified or dissolved. You will become, gradually, suspended in its solution. 'A symbol is not a neutral command,' Toder says. By this time you will have wiped your memory of geometry, because hers is better. This poetry 'leads to its own physics, it holds the attention.'"—Shanna Compton

Emily Toder is the author of the chapbooks Brushes With (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010) and I Hear a Boat (Duets Books, 2010). A graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, she also holds master's degrees in literary translation and library science. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she writes, translates, and works in a university archives.