Darwin's Mother

"Mythology and evolutionary science, intellectual and popular culture, microorganisms 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
"This striking and inventive second collection from Nordgren reads as if a naturalist's observational notebooks found a second, wondrous life as poetry."
--Publishers Weekly
"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