Darwin's Mother

January 1, 2018
This striking and inventive second collection from Nordgren (Best Bones) reads as if a naturalist’s observational notebooks found a second, wondrous life as poetry. Describing both the natural and the digital worlds, Nordgren imbues scientific and technical concepts with warmth and humanness. For instance, “Mitochondrial Eve,” the most recent matrilineal common ancestor of all humans, is portrayed “Reclining in pain on her bed/ under a mile of boulders// always with the door open.” Elsewhere, tourists gawk at a digital data reservoir as if it were a real lake, marveling at the “infinity of opaque surfaces/ refracting sunlight.” Nordgren grants various microscopic biological entities their narrative turn, and these objects speak in unison as “we,” asking the reader to “Try to imagine your entire body as a face/ and your mind a color.” The collection also cannily connects digital networks with those of the analog world; Nordgren could have forced a split between the digital and the “real”—“Fruit and sex and weather// and genuine work”—but instead crafted these poems to demonstrate that there is little difference. “Once spoken, a word can never be/ erased,” Nordgren writes, and her poems repeatedly reveal that “the more we say, the more the world/ has in it.”