Missing the Moon

Scientific elegies of ambition and failure from this esteemed poet

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Attempts to reach the moon, metaphorically and otherwise, are an ancient element of human imagination. With intrusions from mathematics and science, these poems are elegiac celebrations of various ambitions that miss the mark, but matter anyway. The poems sometimes center on events in the life of the poet or members of his family; sometimes on the geography, geology, and the histories accrued by local communities, human and otherwise; sometimes they center on historical figures reimagined—from Giacinto Scelsi to Alan Turing. But these poems are always about boundaries and barriers, crossed sometimes, ignored at peril. They are about distances that must be travelled.