The Second Perfect Number by Joanna Solfrian

Joanna Solfrian refers to her partner as “beloved” and her kids as “kids” in her newest collection, The Second Perfect Number. As she states in the epigraph to her crushing collection, “’the Pythagoreans (founded c. 525 BCE) studied perfect numbers for their “mystical” properties.’” I did not know what a perfect number was before I read Solfrian’s collection. While immersed in these poems I kept asking, “If there is a first perfect number then what is the second perfect number?” Halfway through her poem “The Reflexive Property” she writes, “Your solitude is my solitude,” and I found the answer: it’s these poems. These poems are the second perfect number because of their ‘mystical properties.’ What does this mean? It means that she has studied, as the Pythagoreans did numbers, the human heart. Not just studied, but clearly, has been so inside of its working that she has found a way to make of its beatings, a perfectly beautiful way to express the terrain of family, love, and city. There is a perfection in her tone, in the grounded modality of her musings, that elevates some kind of human experience into exaltation. Damn it, these poems are the heart burst wide open into an elasticity that, I can only guess, her “beloved” has known. That her “kids” know. And now, we too, get to know—perfectly Solfrian.

–Matthew Lippman, author of Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful, winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize