The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor

From different species of automatons to spiders, ants, and bees, from moons to yellow jacket nests, Bianca Spriggs’ Eye is quick and slow enough to show us that the galaxy is vast and atomic, tiny. In this  science-minded and sensual collection, red lips stand in constellation with the “dionaea muscipula on the fly” and tongues are abacuses. Bodies are “astonishing machine[s]” made up of “stardust, / coils of oxygen and carbon / and hydrogen compressed / by time…” The yellow jacket nest is also the nest of the once-self becoming. And a mountain is a parent teaching us about what it means to endure. At a time when our senses and imaginations are inundated with terrifying news and shorthand, poems like these are critical for the ways they remind us that imagination, itself, might be a kind of balm or mercy. That with our imaginations we might remember our kinship to every, every thing in the universe. In The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor Spriggs models awe while deftly conjuring emotion in nuanced moments of syntactical invention. Yes, there is heartache here. Yes, there is loss. But these all give way to necessary metamorphosis and transformation, and this is exactly where, again and again, Spriggs cultivates hope. We are reminded: “Breath, like everything, / waits in line to return / through someone else.”