Reviewed by KT Herr

Scientists working with subatomic structures are often tasked with trying to map the behavior of something that can't be directly observed. Rather than create an instrument to render the particle visible, they'll construct an experiment designed to detect or predict the measurable effects of that particle on something else. Whether it manifests as a fluctuation in mass, an electromagnetic shift, or a seemingly empty space where no space should be, this is often the closest science comes to proof: not a rendering of the thing itself but the ability to form expectations about what the thing does.

In If This Is the Age We End Discovery, winner of the 2019 Alice James Book Award, Rosebud Ben-Oni has constructed a series of poems-as-laboratory, wherein an inquisitive and fiercely driven speaker-as-scientist tests the limits of time, perception, and human understanding while receiving guidance from the universe, whether in the form of parental anecdotes, mystic horses who might, in fact, be kindred spirits from another multiverse, or the inchoate nudgings of tiny molecules a-sneak through unseen thoroughfares.

The book's epigraph, a quote from physicist Dr. Harry Cliff, makes clear we are embarking on an enterprise of strenuous and perhaps irreconcilable inquiry. Where this striving is most acute, language itself folds under the atmospheric forces vying for primacy within the speaker's universe. Each poem brims with charged particles, as the poet's keen eye flicks its lens across a panoply of relationships and relational ideas, seeking certainty-within-the-uncertain.

If this sounds wild, borderless, and tinged with the fabulous, that's because it is. Delightful pseudo-characters populate the collection—vampiric bunnies, warships, nautili and neutrinos—as do symbolic rhetorical flourishes: the "i" in "skin" is perpetually swapped for "u" (mirroring and subversion are twin constants), and in "Poet Wrestling With Graviton As {{:: Gravitron ::}}," the prefix "exo" morphs into the casual valediction "xo" in a clever reflection on language and intimacy. Punctuating this wildness are moments of matter-of-fact stillness. Early in the collection, in an origin-poem of sorts, the speaker offers, "I could tell you. How longing is the only truth." And later in the book: "the science of survival is not a science / of discovery. & when we die, we go in / mystery."

It's clear Ben-Oni is no dilettante when it comes to particle physics, yet her tone is anything but dry or prosaic. Fans of her work will recognize her signature lyric verve and fondness for nineties pop culture. Further, Ben-Oni has woven the fabric of her previous collection, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019), into this text in such a way that, while nothing is repeated or exhausted, it's clear the poet is embarking on inquiries beyond a singular project or fascination. Here, however, the rebellious persona of Ben-Oni's alter-ego Matarose has given way to a voice that feels, if not settled, then more urgently intent on plunging deeper into multifaceted understanding.

Many of the poems share a unifying titling scheme in which the poet "wrestles" with something, a nod to the story of Jacob wrestling the angel. Jewish theology and mysticism, including the three heads of the crown and the practice of gematria, move in a sort of semi-choreographed dance with quantum theory throughout the text––and often, it's unclear who's leading, or whether these two frameworks are, in fact, distinct from one another at all.

As I read, I returned again and again to what seems a central, urgent question: how do we reconcile what it means to be in love with that which has the power to destroy us? And if creation and love are of the same fabric, are destruction and devastation not also the warp within the weave? In the poem "Poet Wrestling With ZeroTo The Power Of," which sits nearly dead-center in the collection, the speaker opines, "Nothing, after all. Is. Our language." Later, we're told "creation is a spell / of double negation," and, indeed, this tensile doubling appears throughout the collection: stasis versus mutability, duality versus multiplicity, singularity versus recursion, and the literal binary of 1s and 0s troubling the idea of human communication.

Ben-Oni is an absolute empress of form. And not just form, but specifically open field and punctuative finesse. She wields a holy triune of punctuation––the period, the colon, and the curly bracket—with particular intention, the overall effect producing something not dissimilar to some forms of scientific or mathematical notation. 

Another subtle but shining example of Ben-Oni's formal flex is the poem "Efes Wrestling With The Poet Who Won't Look Away," a prose poem sporting a cunning reversal of her overarching titling cohesion. The first three lines contain narrowing gaps which give the impression of an intrusion into a solid body––perhaps the keel of one of the warships referenced in the first line, or something more ineffable: the incursion of doubt into a landscape defined by as-yet-only-hypothesized rules.

This collection also locates itself within the body of ecopoetics. In "All Palaces Are Temporary Palaces," a six-year-old niece wonders suddenly about the tenuousness of her own existence, as the speaker observes:

People are already getting married underwater,
The very rich driving cars on coral reefs. 
& if the newest frontiers require technology 
Smaller than an atom, well, now there's the pentaquark 
Which is almost all quark save for one 
Antiquark, & if not for the anti-
Quark, would anything, any-
Thing at all, be?

In another's hands, the imagery and ideas whirling through this collection might feel overblown, melodramatic, even histrionic. But Ben-Oni's deft and exacting proficiency with craft, particularly evident in her deployment of enjambment and punctuation toward alternating moments of rupture or unexpected ease, give the overall impression of being whisked through a sort of alternate universe amusement park of poems where rides are designed as much for deep wonderment as they are for enjoyment. This is clearly the labor of a consummate engineer.

Though I risk trotting out an increasingly tiresome observation, it's hard to believe If This Is the Age We End Discovery was written pre-pandemic, in the sense that what these poems contend with feels not just timely but prescient. Permeability, mortality, divinity, the insidious fallacy of the real/artificial divide, the inevitable rupture of both natural and familial ecosystems; these themes flash before a spotlight Ben-Oni refuses to shine in any single direction, sending the brxght xyx of her intellect caroming from mystery to mystery, twinned by the sharp report of her incisive phrasing. 

It might be tempting, owing to the heightened tension thrumming throughout, to misread this book as an exercise in beguiling or glorifying disaster. Doubt, dismantlement, anxious unraveling, plucking at loose threads—all present themselves in turn. But through the entire collection runs a stubborn hopefulness refusing to lay down its many unconventional tools, where the idea of nullification represents not an abstract subtraction, but an equal and answering addition to whatever is. Especially in light of all the last year has wrought, I feel deeply comforted by the reminder that even "nothing / -ness is not without kin."