Chaos Theories by Elizabeth Hazen (review)

Chaos theory, a mathematical field studying deterministic randomness, is built on the notion that even without new variables, a tiny change in a given system can have massive effects on the outcome. Chaos Theories, by Elizabeth Hazen, puts the every day minutia of human existence into such terms, analyzing the consequence of a single missed alarm, one missing person out of billions in a time of massive population growth, or a moon that never formed. All these grand ideas are balanced against the narrative of her son's birth, the tiny variable that throws her vast cosmos into turmoil with outcomes as great as they are terrible. With poems appearing in Best American Poetry 2013 and Southwest Review, among other markets, and a style that blends science with song, similar to Kimiko Hahn, Hazen has clearly identified her literary niche.

The opening poem, "Chaos Theory," is this theory in motion, overviewing the idea without slogging through math. "All it takes for things to turn / is a blip, a shift minute as the flutter of wings, / the opening of a door, a telephone / unanswered," Hazen writes. Focusing on these tiny details, she goes on to say, "I wake each day to an alarm," but the poem ends with, "Even this sorry heart, / a periodic after all, pounds wildly / at entrances, exits, the memory of his touch, / try as it will to keep a steady beat."

"Ghost Story" focuses more on these anxieties and phantom sensations. The open lines read, "What you heard / is not the same as what was said." Hazen describes the "catastrophe" of a crying child, and how "ghosts / can move through walls, inhabit your skin, reflect / like wavelengths, echoing light or sound, the idea / but not the thing." After several couplets describing the fear that comes with facing an illusionary figure, the narrator chastising herself to be braver because specters like this are not real, the final couplet reads, "The voice you hear is in your head. Over / and over she asks, Then why are you afraid?"

Other poems are more rooted in the concrete science for which the collection is named. "Ceres" begins with a quote from NASA describing "gravitational perturbations from Jupiter" that kept Ceres from becoming a full planet. She describes the myth of Jupiter being able to limit Ceres due to her "lesser form," but reminds the reader of "her domain: growth, harvest, motherly love, / and like all mothers she is volatile." After ruminating on Ceres, Hazen writes of her own experience giving birth. "When he pushed through me, / gagging for that first breath, no equation could / contain his need, my relief, the bleeding." In the end, she praises Ceres's strength, writing, "however / the universe has failed you, you endure. […] You are exactly where you want to be."

Section two opens with "Strange Attractors," in which Hazen describes how "chaos breeds patterns" in a bar late at night, where "I am strange and turbulent," reminding that "Movement / is a theory too." This more fluid application of science to the quotidian resurfaces in "Thanatosis," where she says "the alternative to fight or flight is tonic immobility," with the narrator reliving the time she hid in her mother's closet, in the pitch black behind her dresses. "While I'm inside this darkness I can see / no difference between death and immobility."

This scene plays out again in "Closet," except set from a second-person perspective, addressing an unknown "you" who this time hides in the father's closet, where the narrator finds adult magazines. This discovery of adulthood within her childhood self culminates in the lines, "a word takes shape / like the answer to a question no one has asked you yet."

Ghosts likewise return in "When I was a Girl" which begins, "My memory is a haunted house that will / not let me leave." The poem goes on about how this house watches her from every angle, observing her actions, trying "to prove I'm nothing but a neatly folded lie." However, the final two couplets reverse the overbearing tone, embracing a more...