Publisher's Synopsis
The Visible Planets is a celebration and a eulogy of galactic proportions. Simultaneously an exploration of universal joy and the mourning of a lost sister, Aly Pierce's The Visible Planets is a reminder of all the beauty in this fleeting life. Utilizing the cosmos and its celestial bodies, Pierce exposes the juxtaposing starlight and black holes inherent in every human. Along the way the reader meets a colorful cast of characters (including Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, and Phobos) who all have their own flaws, insecurities, and desires just like anybody in this universe. The Visible Planets request the reader to love as deeply as they can while they have the time and space because eventually every star must fade no matter how bright it is.
"Space can be a cold abyss, or it can be a tender darkness where we remake what haunts us. 'It's hard to make progress / with old science' but I dare you to tell me Aly Pierce's poems don't draw on all the former stories told about the stars to make a new cosmos where every planet or moon is a person we know intimately. These poems circle the unknown until we recognize it as already part of us. I read them & feel smaller than I realized I was, but what a gift to find the known universe granular as it travels through Pierce's lens, at once exploding & perfected by attention. Here, the vocabulary of particle physics, of math, of medicine, of humility, of grief, of orbit, is a limitless love language we all have in common."--Emily O'Neill
Poetry. Women's Studies, LGBTQIA Studies.
