Where Is Everyone!

Where Is Everyone! is an urgent cry of revolutionary spirit, but it's also a cry bedecked with extinction and nearly possessed by wonder. I think of Peewee Herman screaming and flailing out the pet store in flames with snakes in both fists, right into the camera with heroic terror--like, Where Is Everyone! What Ponge and Fabre gave scientific nature writing was their imagination--Zuba does this too, but to meet--to illuminate the possibilities of meeting--nature in crisis. "The revolution of cells is upon us"--these poems not only proclaim and prove this augury, but they help us to feel how the work of one poem is part of an already inconceivable yet immanent collective activity, created by the "autonaut[s] of every species and cosmic order." That she can translate scientific perception into poetic companionship so breathlessly, with such a frank ecstasy and generous humility, gives me the inspiration and loving intensity I need to get with and what and where everyone really is.

--Farnoosh Fathi