Anjet Daanje may have written the Great Novel of Quantum Physics: a love letter spanning centuries, a spellbinding work of art and poetry and imagination that feels like a living organism, 736 pages of slippery, unpredictable particles blinking like dead stars in the darkest of nights.  This novel runs the gamut, from the brambles to the bells, the rain, the buzzing of flies, the clocks, the howling wind and the blackberries. It feels haunted and a little otherworldly. One of the best that I have ever read. 

In 2020, Chloe Benjamin came across the story of NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a cosmic particle detector in Antarctica, that had recently observed a series of unusual radio signals which appeared to be coming from below the horizon, in a manner that could not be explained. 

If we create ourselves with and through language, it seems to me that Gertrude Stein’s project was to dismantle herself and a whole century through language, to uncreate herself as she had been created by her father, by her sneering professor at John Hopkins, by her brother, to undo the manner of the nineteenth century. Get rid of commas. Get rid of question marks. She did not want to be told when to take a breath and when something was a question or who to love or how to dress. Get rid of clichés. Break through the conventions of genre. Stein was going to step out of the frame, away from the life of her mother and aunts, away from the uncomfortable femininities that had been societally constructed to keep her in her place.

He crossed to the yarn shelves. It was his favorite place in the whole world. ‘Look at all the new colours!’ The shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland: bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkard’s face, and pure, bilious whitey. Amongst these were punkish hot pinks and acid yellows, violent tones that made people recoil until they saw the finished cloth and saw how skilfully John could mix sour greens with wheats and nightshades until it was a field of spring bluebells.

I was born near water.
I was born on a farm where many other dogs and other animals were born and cared for and lived. 
I would never learn what the farm was intending to do with me. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe I was supposed to grow old there. 
Or maybe I was always supposed to leave. To go work somewhere else and be with a new family.
But it was home to me. My mother was there. My brothers and my sisters. An early memory: waking up to a den of pale noses surrounding me before our mother came, the silhouette of her face looming over us in the sky, the tall triangles of her ears pocketing the smell of the coast.

One’s soul cannot escape a dying body if the feathers of pigeons or wild birds fill their bed or pillow. To hold someone back until a loved one arrives, a bag of pigeon feathers is thrust under the dying person. There were also birds of ill omen, like the robin pecking on the window signaling a coming illness. Swallows and owls told of a change in the weather. Charlotte describes, in a poem, other creatures signaling grave news, like the wolf, black bull, or the fantastical goblin hound, “Which will be a certain sign / That one beneath the roof must die / Before the year’s decline.”

Ada Limón is a nervy and musical force, all string and woodwind and percussion, whose dealings with emotions and the world are intense and unabashedly direct. I cannot recommend this collection enough. Read her.

Something is unwinding. I can’t know how things will go in the time I have left. I can’t predict what will happen. My grief won’t end, but it will keep changing. I imagine myself sitting on Paul’s grave looking at his stone. I imagine the early May bloom as it was when we buried him, the cemetery wide-awake with color, and I think of Joyce’s Bloom, and I remember a wedding in Brooklyn on Bloomsday in June when the thunder sounded and the lightning flashed, and I think of Paul’s Anna Blume pushing her cart in the city that’s falling apart and my own Violet Bloom in What I Loved, dressed in the clothes of her beloved Bill after he dies. ... I held Paul’s face when he was dying, and I talked about the fun we had, all the fun, and he heard me. And, after he died, it hailed.