The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)
(Scribner, $26)
A book about the demise of the universe doesn’t sound like much fun, said Leah Crane in the New Scientist. But cosmologist Katie Mack has created a “rollicking tour” of the various possible paths to total oblivion that reads less like grim prophesy and “more like an animated discussion with your favorite quirky and brilliant professor.” It helps that most of the scenarios are unlikely to unfold for billions of years, and that Mack, who teaches at North Carolina State University, can explain them clearly without resorting to equations or jargon. Though I regularly read and write about cosmology, “I learned a great deal,” including new ways to share her excitement about her field. “What stands out most is her pure enjoyment of physics, and it is contagious.”
Inevitably, there is some time travel involved, said James Gleick in The New York Times. Light emitted from a galaxy 10 billion light-years away takes 10 billion years to reach Earth, and Mack explains how today’s telescopes let us peer deeper into the past than ever before. Still, “most of what astronomers know comes not from seeing but from deduction,” and Mack lays out a series of scientists’ end-times scenarios. We could experience the “Big Crunch,” a sudden reversal of the universe’s expansion that would make the stars explode. Or perhaps the universe will expand perpetually, leading to “heat death”—a slow, agonizing progression toward a temperature of absolute zero. Dark matter could trigger
by Eduardo C. Corral. Here is a beautiful and moving book of love, immigration, and grief. Switching between Spanish and English, between Eros and exile, it is a lyric testimony to how we live inside bodies, across borders. A pain herein is made into a song.
Guillotine
by Victoria Chang. A long elegy for the poet’s mother, Obit is the kind of poetry collection that creates a new genre. A reinvention of form? A symphony? A manifesto? All of the above and then some. It is heartbreaking and enthralling. It sings and instructs. It is a world all its own; one that changes ours.
Obit
by Natalie Diaz. A Mojave poet offers a great lesson in what a collection of poems can do, from the powerful lyrics for her brother to erotic poems to those about the disappearance of indigenous people to poems about what we do to the natural world. All of it comes together as one hymn: a song of candor and tenderness.
Postcolonial Love Poem
by Carolyn Forché. This book is filled with poems that speak
In the Lateness of the World
with ethical urgency. Open it to “The Boatman,” for instance, (“I will see that you arrive safely, my friend”) and you will come under the spell of something as fresh as morning news and as timeless as a parable. It is a book that takes a journey around the world and into the world. Yet there is also something new here for Forché: an even larger scope, a prophetic mode.
by Edward Hirsch. Nearly every poem here is one sentence long, given to the loved one who’s lost. In the time of Covid and Zoom funerals, many people will relate to the imagery of being intimately alone with grief, yet at a distance. Hirsch writes movingly about his gradual loss of vision, while addressing all kinds of loss and offering an astonished discovery of what grief might reveal.
by Danez Smith. This book is so many different things in one: a hymn to friendship, an elegy, and a thrilling, dynamic political stand. There is a warmth in these poems that isn’t something one often finds in American poetry, and humor and sadness. Homie is as exuberant and bold as it is heartbreaking.
Stranger by Night Homie