Quantum Entanglement
110 Pages/Perfect bound $15
Carol Lynne Knight mingles scientific curiosity with stunning meditations on language, and the myriad ways life unfolds. There’s a rare and precious intimacy here, a sharp, smart humor, and a sense that we are in the wonderful presence of a truly original voice.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
Quantum Entanglement uses metaphors for physics to create a landscape that begins every day by driving to work with meditations on motion, including the space and time of her own erotic history. She is sinuous and adept with “the smoke of memory,” as she “sleepwalk(s) into the sixth dimension.” Her poems offer a landscape that is her own personal Last Picture Show, with boys in the backseats of cars, lovers meeting in motels, and meditations on the mistakes of an early marriage, as well as a compassion for the young teenage men she knew — those who went to war and lost so much. More substantial than nostalgia, they become repairs and atonements, revealing the reasons for her intrigue with entanglement.
— Diane Wakoski
QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT
If you measure love’s path,
pairs of electrons that spin ambiguously
suddenly become a marriage.
If I count the freckles on your back
while you sleep, shine
a flashlight under the sheets,
you wake and turn counter
clockwise — toward me,
if I sleep on the left side
and dream that our love is quantified
with decimal points, even as it flees,
and touch mutates into observation.
If I tell you the world is flying apart,
it could be true,
theoretically. But this morning
the backyard green
rises, surrounds me with tendrils of prayer,
and the first woodpecker of spring drills
into the pecan tree outside the window.
Feathers on his red cap — so smooth.