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Dark Matter
Christine Klocek-Lim’s stunning Dark Matter reminds that poetry is an agent of transcendence and percipience. She casts her clear-eyed gaze and wonderment skyward and returns to us earthy, elegiac and astonishing poems of luminous lyricism . . . You’ll return to these poems again and again and each time you’ll emerge newly awed.
—Patty Paine, Author of Grief & Other Animals
In these poems, black holes, nebulae, stellar winds and the march of constellations somehow feel like the natural partners of parenting and relationship difficulties, of the joys and upheavals of daily human life. In clear, confident language, the poems condense into wise emotional insights that make this collection as much a map for modern living as they make it an astronomy lesson of astonishing breadth and variety. Bravo!
—Nic Sebastian, Author of Dark and Like A Web and co-founder of The Poetry Storehouse
The perspective of Christine Klocek-Lim’s Dark Matter is that of a star-gazer on Earth, a parent with a rich inner life, looking up, “where nothing important / happens quickly.” These poems reveal a rare intimacy with the sky, an affinity for the stuff of space, planets, stars, even chaos and collapse. Each lyric is as much a love song to oblivion as it is a portrait of life now.
—Billy Merrell, Author of Talking in the Dark
—Patty Paine, Author of Grief & Other Animals
In these poems, black holes, nebulae, stellar winds and the march of constellations somehow feel like the natural partners of parenting and relationship difficulties, of the joys and upheavals of daily human life. In clear, confident language, the poems condense into wise emotional insights that make this collection as much a map for modern living as they make it an astronomy lesson of astonishing breadth and variety. Bravo!
—Nic Sebastian, Author of Dark and Like A Web and co-founder of The Poetry Storehouse
The perspective of Christine Klocek-Lim’s Dark Matter is that of a star-gazer on Earth, a parent with a rich inner life, looking up, “where nothing important / happens quickly.” These poems reveal a rare intimacy with the sky, an affinity for the stuff of space, planets, stars, even chaos and collapse. Each lyric is as much a love song to oblivion as it is a portrait of life now.
—Billy Merrell, Author of Talking in the Dark
- GenresPoetry
124 pages, Paperback
Published September 17, 2015
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About the author
Christine Klocek-Lim
17 books35 followersChristine Klocek-Lim spends most of her time daydreaming—which isn’t much different from what she did as a girl in northeast Pennsylvania, as a college student in Pittsburgh, as a twenty-something technical writer in New York City, and as a young mother in suburban New Jersey. For the past decade or so she’s been dream-surfing in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania.
She received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. She has one young adult novel, Disintegrate, and four chapbooks: Ballroom – a love story, Cloud Studies – a sonnet sequence, How to photograph the heart, and The book of small treasures.
Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for 3 Quarks Daily’s Prize in Arts & Literature, Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition, the Kenneth & Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and for the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes.
Her website is christinekloceklim.com.
She received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. She has one young adult novel, Disintegrate, and four chapbooks: Ballroom – a love story, Cloud Studies – a sonnet sequence, How to photograph the heart, and The book of small treasures.
Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for 3 Quarks Daily’s Prize in Arts & Literature, Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition, the Kenneth & Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and for the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes.
Her website is christinekloceklim.com.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 14, 2015
It took me a long time to finish Christine Klocek-Lim’s Dark Matter. I tend to read everything fast, even poetry, but this book will make you dizzy if you do that. The imagery is almost always the night sky: asteroids, planets, constellations, stars falling and colliding and exploding. It is a lovely collection of poems, grave and merry as the universe revolving around us.
Once, about thirty years ago, recovering from a bad break-up and terribly lonely, I found myself driving home from a brightly-lit shopping mall at night. Once I got away from the traffic and the neon, I began to notice the dark sky above my car, clouds moving past the moon. And suddenly the sadness that had been with me for weeks lifted. These poems have that kind of power.
I began to fold down the corners of poems I especially liked as I read, but soon found myself making a mess of the book! So, here are a few that I found especially fine: “How to search for aliens” with its nighttime walk home from an incense-thick church service and its narrator tracking “the stars that winked between the street lights” as she walks next to her mother who wonders if prayer lacks “enough prime numbers hidden in the signal”. And the cold but profound comfort of “Arp 81: One hundred million years later” with its new galaxy that will “die directly on top of our own like water pooled in the soft hollow of a rock.” And especially “At the center of the Milky Way” with this powerful truth: “Relative to the desire for survival, death is small.”
This is a wise and exacting book, plain-spoken but dazzlingly complex, brilliant and dark. It only improves upon rereading, which is my test for the best kind of poetry.
Once, about thirty years ago, recovering from a bad break-up and terribly lonely, I found myself driving home from a brightly-lit shopping mall at night. Once I got away from the traffic and the neon, I began to notice the dark sky above my car, clouds moving past the moon. And suddenly the sadness that had been with me for weeks lifted. These poems have that kind of power.
I began to fold down the corners of poems I especially liked as I read, but soon found myself making a mess of the book! So, here are a few that I found especially fine: “How to search for aliens” with its nighttime walk home from an incense-thick church service and its narrator tracking “the stars that winked between the street lights” as she walks next to her mother who wonders if prayer lacks “enough prime numbers hidden in the signal”. And the cold but profound comfort of “Arp 81: One hundred million years later” with its new galaxy that will “die directly on top of our own like water pooled in the soft hollow of a rock.” And especially “At the center of the Milky Way” with this powerful truth: “Relative to the desire for survival, death is small.”
This is a wise and exacting book, plain-spoken but dazzlingly complex, brilliant and dark. It only improves upon rereading, which is my test for the best kind of poetry.
April 18, 2019
Dark Matter makes the infinite human and intimate, and gives the little things we take for granted a sense of wonder.
December 21, 2015
All of the poems in this collection are named for, and refer to, various celestial bodies or astronomical events — planets, constellations, galaxies, nebulae, and black holes. In fact, each of the poems was inspired by an image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website.
Klocek-Lim writes of the beauty, wonder, and unknowability of the universe — both on a literal level and as a way of talking about the beauty, wonder, and unknowability of life in all its visible and invisible aspects. Our lives are full of dark matter, the unseen forces that push and pull us, that shape and reshape us, that lie behind our dreams and desires.
Full review coming soon.
Klocek-Lim writes of the beauty, wonder, and unknowability of the universe — both on a literal level and as a way of talking about the beauty, wonder, and unknowability of life in all its visible and invisible aspects. Our lives are full of dark matter, the unseen forces that push and pull us, that shape and reshape us, that lie behind our dreams and desires.
Full review coming soon.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews