Wave Function

by Coco M. Keehl

That our bodies (and everything they touch) are malleable collections of particles, that time and our perception of it are fictions, that location is only fixed by semiotics are ever-compounding propositions of sciences both hard and soft. In Coco M. Keehl’s WAVE FUNCTION, these very propositions are broken open across the page, subjectivity is magnified to its molecule, spacetime is breached by the poem’s ability to trespass modes of containment. When the speaker asks “How do you know what altered state you’re in?” they are also giving permission to enter the poems themselves. The reader is invoked, like an incantation, to the spectral, discorporate field of Keehl’s language where every object, sense, and action are codified and decodified, where meaning is both metastatic and implosive, where every word hinges on the inevitability of its own collapse. Wave Function, like the universe, is a terminal text, expanding and exhaling unto its own finality.
-
from "Undiscovered Subatomic Particles"

"Dark matter can’t be found
if it doesn’t exist or
god where be energy or
the physics of heat

& I rippled two black holes in & out unending infinities
every entropy
used to measure the rearrangement
I rearrange then
myself easier to remove
unbreak reorder was once
three in womb
but came in two it did

not surprise me to learn
I was twinned. Here is
my hand & here
other palm to your shoulder
you surrender to god
so what

what makes you think
what makes you think
my questioning
is weakness?"

Genres: Poetry

56 pages

Published December 1, 2019

About the author

Coco M. Keehl is a poet living in the forests of Michigan with her dog, Carver. She is founder of GRAVITON, a science inspired poetry magazine.

Reviews

[Garrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much scientific jargon combined with a complicated poetry structure made this collection hard to follow for me. I like physics but I felt like I needed Wikipedia to understand the basic idea of many poems. Hoc est corpus, loop theory, and wave function not yet collapsed, were my favorites.