Random Experiments in Bioluminescence

Summary

Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is a remarkable collection of luminous poems for cherishing cultures, languages, and the Earth — From poet and urbanist Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo.
“Listen with your natural body,” writes Shimshon-Santo. “In the beginning, there was song.” This collection tracks a woman’s search for language and belonging. Choral, cryptographic, and exhilarating, Shimshon-Santo provides glimpses into a poetics of planetary livability.
The collection opens with a “genealogy of the moment” in “x or x prime clock time.” Trees and vines “tangle their hair together” to escape over brick walls. A piano decomposes into forest mulch. Seaweed fronds curl around pilings. Gravity “plants humans in the ground like oaks” while black birds murmurate skyward. Echolocate in the galaxy through poems, and become a “rapture gawker of infinity consciousness.”
Mother tongues join a line dance of translations with family and friends. A trilingual villanelle for òrìṣà cohabitates with talmudic inspired piyyut. Poems morph into flow charts, pictograms, haikus, and chants — scattered between photographs of habitats.
Her verse has kinesthetic momentum on the page—flowing from right to left or left to right, ascending or descending, to weave conversations between languages. The outcome of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence is a homecoming to the body and the planet; respect for multiple languages and awe for life in our pluriverse.