If I could go back in time, I would have taken a minor in Biology. Why? Because biology gives us Latin, graphs, and specimens to understand the inherently incomprehensible: the otherness of other creatures. Kelli Anne Noftle’s poems could be called an enchanted science, seeking to reclaim the sense of wonder and weirdness lacking in more typical forms of scientific inquiry. Her work straddles a desire to know something absolutely and an equally strong reservation that no claim, scientific or otherwise, can entirely exhaust mystery from the universe. Noftle’s poetry is particularly enchanted with that moment of scientific suspension opening us into the infinite, if only in the form of distance. It is my empirical opinion that this is an experience worth reclaiming.

I grew up near the ocean. Walking along the shore, I passed by jellyfish, birds, clumps of seaweed every time I visited. These sights became normal: I learned to overlook them by expecting their presence, a passive acceptance. “Nomenclature” rattles me from this complacency. The call-and-response structure manages to stage several aspects of psychological involvement, from the inquisitive to the narrative. There are playful notes struck throughout the poem, as well as passages evoking a child-like exhilaration at tactile sensation: “The white part feels like muscle. The gray and black root feels like a stick”. “Nomenclature” ultimately doesn’t isolate the organism; rather, it claims all the associations, emotions, and names attached to its presence AND absence. The poem concludes with a wonderful series of terms, each suggestive of the distance this comprehension affords: “Cowrie, Keyhole. Bluebottle. Fissure.”

Noftle’s second poem in this selection, “Take a Photograph of Us Here”, runs on an anaphoric repetition of “Because...”. The litany that follows begins perhaps as a response to an assertion, but this response quickly gains its own velocity. The images and topics touched in this litany suggest a speaker driven by the deictic desire to assert even against the messiness of the sensuous world. Her final line, “Light cannot diffuse my answer”, harkens to the earlier obsession with Newton’s optic experiments and the chemical process of developing a negative; this assertion also outlines a beautiful but compelling reduction—the world is not entirely claimed by scientific laws, unable to “diffuse” the power of poetic response. Ryan Winet