Darwin's Mother - (Pitt Poetry) by Sarah Rose Nordgren (Paperback)

About the Book

In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.

Book Synopsis

In Darwin's Mother, curious beasts are excavated in archeological digs, Charles Darwin's daughter describes the challenges of breeding pigeons, and a forest of trees shift and sigh in their sleep. With a keen sense of irony that rejects an anthropocentric worldview and an imagination both philosophical and playful, the poems in this collection are marked by a tireless curiosity about the intricate workings of life, consciousness, and humanity's place in the universe.

Review Quotes

Darwin's Mother is an adventure in the human experience of anthropology and archeology, real and imaginary. Also full of stunning reports from the poet's interior, as in 'Moral Animal, ' and 'Movie Night, ' the book has a big scope but feels strikingly honest. Sweet, painful, weird, smart, and deeply insightful.-- "Jennifer Michael Hecht"

Mythology and evolutionary science, intellectual and popular culture, micro organisms and dinosaurs, Eros and illness--these pairings play off each other throughout the book, to highlight another powerful pair: pathos and ambivalence. What is being considered here? That our desire for knowledge is both necessary and presumptuous? Perhaps, but I think the deeper recognition is the human tendency to order the world according to our own perspective. The poems in this sparkling book make it abundantly clear that such a perspective has stark limits, and the order we think we prefer might indeed be missing the point of existence.-- "Maurice Manning"

Nordgren interrogates the accumulation of humankind's scientific knowledge and concludes, correctly and poetically, that 'our world/ is vast, but vanishingly small.' As she observes the collisions between science and the material world, including the deeply unknowable Feminine, she convinces us that data can be seen as, interestingly enough, a metaphor for spirit. Read this astonishingly original collection and be edified and amazed. And grateful for this fine literary report from the field by such a keenly intelligent observer of our grand human experiment.-- "Sidney Wade"

About the Author

Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of Best Bones, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in national journals such as AGNI, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and she is the recipient of two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Nordgren is currently a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Cincinnati.