Stop and Smell the Fractals (and Everything In Between) by Caroline Jennings

Caroline Jennings’ Stop and Smell the Fractals (And Everything In Between) is a striking chapbook. Jennings’ poetry innovatively explores everyday life through the lens of one of our world’s strongest foundations: mathematics. From equations to odes, poems approach complex moments with calculated candor. In “Life as a Function Where x=Time,” the poet tracks a young nephew’s life along the X-axis. In “Asymptote, a spine mimics a graphed line, blending the body with geometry. Stained glass windows appear as personified “octagonal geometry” in a cathedral. People’s “laughter blends into one uniform wave function.” This chapbook embarks on a gorgeous quest for the world’s patterns and solutions while acknowledging the forces that complicate them. Caroline Jennings is a poet with a mathematician’s eye and a generous artist’s heart. Stop and Smell the Factals (And Everything In Between) is an important chapbook to read.

–Elizabeth Muscari

Tormenting geese, a stolen parking spot, stain glass from a cathedral’s windows, the lack of precision in a nautilus shell, poor posture: in this chapbook, Caroline Jennings delivers a disarmingly earnest and often humorous study of a mind obsessed with the perfection proposed by mathematical equations. By the end, we learn her way of tolerating and trusting the insights of all that refuses to add up. As Jennings so movingly puts it in one these marveling poems, “but I search anyway.”

–Geffrey Davis, author of One Wild Word Away