What does a poet do with string theory? With chaos mathematics, with the Big Bang, with the neuroscience of thought? In Weaving Science and Soul, Curt Curtin answers with fifty-plus poems that range from the subatomic to the cosmic, and always return to the human.

 

Organized in three movements — A Habitable Planet, Meditations, and Last Light — this collection traces a life's arc of questioning. Curtin draws on evolutionary biology, quantum physics, and superstring theory not as scientific argument but as living metaphor, finding in the universe's deepest structures a mirror for grief, belief, mortality, and love. He is neither cheerful nor despairing; he is awake.

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These are poems for readers who have stood at the edge of what can be known and felt the vertigo — and the beauty — of not knowing. For those who seek meaning outside of dogma, who suspect that the language of science and the language of the soul are, at their furthest reach, speaking the same thing.

Curt Curtin's eighth and final collection was published posthumously.