Songs from the Black Hole by Loretta Oleck

“SONGS FROM THE BLACK HOLE is an extraordinary collection of poems. The poems themselves are a series of sensuous shooting stars. There are raspberries and rum, comets, helixes, egg yolks, God particles, string theory and Schrodinger’s Cat. Loretta Oleck uses these images and words to write about her life, her lovers, her own late father. Everything is in the past. Everything is happening now. Everything is yet to come. In this beautiful and lyrical and profound collection, Oleck makes the case that we are all vast multiverses of ourselves, simultaneously blowing apart and exploding inward into something that is new and whole and unchartered. There is bitterness and there is hope. There is elegy and celebration. There are these wonderful poems.”

–Matt Bialer, Author of FORMATION and DISTANT SHORES

“Written under the dual signs of synesthesia and astrophysics, Songs from the Black Hole considers the sensory traces of human interactions within the web of forces that surround and compose us: “A Kandinskian braille of bump-along trails and willy-nilly symbols / pockmarked with squiggles scrape me inside out.” Along these trails, Oleck’s speakers explore intimacy and familial bonds, legacies of both gene and psyche. The poems circle through observations about art making and the natural world, returning each time to the space of intimacy where outer and inner worlds converge: “I shuck pistachios and feed them to you, one by one, / so that you can rest under bowed branches of pear blossoms.”‘

–BK Fischer, Author of St. Rage’s Vault

“In Songs From The Black Hole, Loretta Oleck explores the Higgs Boson from the POV of a wife abandoned. She uses this recent scientific breakthrough as a metaphor for marriage. Science and poetry collide; they clash and explode, shining a harsh, yet perceptive light on deception and its thoughtful aftermath. These poems explore love in a new, brilliant and totally accessible way. This wonderful book stayed with me.”

–Alexis Rhone Fancher, Poetry editor, Cultural Weekly

“She is a poet who has found and spoken warmly and humbly the primal truth from which we come—the identity of one’s own body with the cosmos. All the skin of difference  is only a song we sing.  She gives the language of science back to the science of being alive and loving and knowing in the body.”

–Robert Kelly, (2016-2017 Poet Laureate of Dutchess County)