In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Wind-Up Gods
  • Hadara Bar-Nadav (bio)
Stefi Weisburd . The Wind-Up Gods. Black Lawrence Press.

Stefi Weisburd unquestionably is a poet working from multiple knowledge systems. For confirmation of this, one need only glance at her Newtonian Girl sequence of poems or titles such as "Natural History of Ether," "Memoir of an Electron," or "Antibodies in Paradise." A poet of intellectual agility, Weisburd's biographical statement reveals that she studied physics at Berkeley and Stanford, served as an analyst for the U.S. Congress, and was an editor for Science News. In her first collection of poetry, The Wind-Up Gods, Weisburd navigates the mysterious and often violent edge where science, faith, and art meet.

Weisburd explores the limits of knowledge, often with humorous results. In "Newtonian Girl at the Bris," "Einstein, Newton and Schrödinger discover / common ground and waltz on it." In "Newtonian Girl Goes on a Date," the speaker explains: "Sometimes space folds back on itself and it's too dark / to go out. Sometimes a bald man who has witnessed / your underwear at the Laundromat invites you to / dance on a fast train." Weisburd offsets what could be deemed haughtiness in less able hands [End Page 175] with a rare combination of vulnerability and wit reminiscent of Larry Levis but with Sylvia Plath's vivid and cutting language and a mad scientist thrown into the mix.

Weisburd owns the poet's skilled hand and graphic nature, but she also owns the scientist's skilled hand and relentless nature. Among the most striking poems in her book is the prose poem "Behind My Ear Is a Little Palace in Broad Daylight" in which the speaker undergoes acupuncture to treat migraines. Here, science and poetry conjoin in visceral, elegant imagery:

Behind my knee, the universe hums in its velvet bag. Through my wrists, a pulse shimmers with electric eels. I imagine leaking out through the needles, diffusing into the little room papered with Chinese music. Imagine sleep gently tacked to the table like a beetle specimen.

In Weisburd's poetry, the senses and intellect are fully charged, whether the speaker is contemplating her body or her faith.

. . . dream minions shriek and scatter when Dr. Li returns, bursting into the dark. I have not yet been resurrected I want to proclaim but she is already extracting that desire. Seven times she carries the needles, like offerings, to the red box. Traffic outside is relentless. She says go home little godling. Put on your socks.

The whole world is wonderfully and painfully alive in Weisburd's work; the walls sing, the traffic sings, the soul leaves and returns to its body, and the speaker must go home to put on her socks-a final human gesture in which the poet-patient-scientist is humbled. As a prose poem placed early in the book, Weisburd alerts her readers to the formal variety to come. Though some readers may be quick to critique the expansive formal reach of this collection, this expansiveness surely is one of its many strengths, which kept me riveted.

I recall first reading two of the poems from Weisburd's collection in Poetry magazine. "Sponge Boy" is Weisburd's sweaty lyric poem about a fifteen-year-old boy slowly killing himself via drugs. "Sponge Boy" is fairly raw and bold material for Poetry, but it is undeniably skillful. In strained and bloody tercets, Weisburd writes of "the velvet yes yes / of gas fumes" and "seven decapitated frog heads, like little Stalins" the boy leaves lining his driveway. His hunger for finding drugs in all places leads to his mother's wish to "Strain the savage from his cortex. Let / the twisted thing drip clean from him, feral & streaming, // as from the slit throats of slaughtered calves." Weisburd's imagery is explosive and exquisite.

"Little God Origami," the elegiac sonnet that also appeared in Poetry and closes The Wind-Up Gods, displays that mix of intellectual agility and emotional vulnerability that is so enticing in Weisburd's work. The poem begins: "The number of corners in the soul can't / compare with the universe's [End Page 176] dimensions folded / neatly into swans." The deliberate...

pdf

Share