Sol and the Rockettes

Sol and the Rockettes is a collection of poetry exploring our solar system and many of the lesser known qualities and characteristics of planetary bodies. The poetry relates these characteristics through a combination of scientific language and a mishmash of conflicting metaphors; this includes an overarching family structure, which describes the planetary bodies as human-ish figures, with human traits representative of their physical traits. The accompanying essay, “Building a Home for Readers in the Unfamiliar Territory of Space,” details the relationship between science and poetry in a few select works (Mary Barnard’s Time and the White Tigress, Christopher Dewdney’s The Natural History, and Christian Bök’s The Xenotext), and examines, in particular, the techniques used to integrate science in poetry in meaningful ways, in relation to the techniques used in Sol and the Rockettes