Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. Women's Studies. The microbiologist Mary A. Hood has been acclaimed for poetry and essays that combine a scientist's expertise with a gift for lyrical descriptions of the natural world. ALL THE SPECTRAL FRACTURES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS offers a compilation of Hood's three published poetry collections and other poems, drawing on decades of fieldwork as well as her commitment to feminism and environmentalism.
Hood approaches her varied subject matter--swamps and forests, small-town life, high-stakes science--with bracing honesty, wit, and compassion. Her poems offer meditations on the interconnections between humans, plants, and animals (we of the self-replicating molecules), and portraits of ordinary people trying to keep it together / without the glue of ego, uncertain a unified theory / resolves chaos, wondering if we must break / to be whole.
Bridging the scientific with the lyric, while also spanning history, the seasons, the globe, and a rich multitude of voices... her lines sparkle with 'the glorious immediacy, ' even while speaking out against social injustices and the injuries inflicted on the earth.--Jill McCabe Johnson
ALL THE SPECTRAL FRACTURES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS shades from Sherwood Anderson to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop to Loren Eiseley in its attention to human community, creatures and objects, and the unknown mysteries of existence, loss, and death.--Laura-Gray Street
Mary A. Hood's poems are often like short stories in miniature... Hood seems to be the odd microbiologist who is willing to sit down for a cup of coffee with almost anyone, and elicit a story, an illumination, and a poem.--Emily Grosholz
