According to “My History with Stars,” a mom spoon-fed her daughter “stars instead of peas;” by middle school, they’d all “ricochet” inside her, either “trying to become one/or forming a constellation.” Aly Pierce’s beautifully constructed first book ripples with energy, fashioning interplanetary systems through her mastery of the language of astrophysics, classical myth, and human longing. As a writer who loves to pick through the syntax of science, I admire Pierce’s deftness with equations as extended metaphors, employed to examine the forces affecting those in her orbit.
The Visible Planets begins with a litany of praise for the Hubble Space Telescope, a recurring character who’s the “Catcher of star spills.//Cosmology teacher. School bus/with the best view in the galaxy” as well as “Time determiner. Beginning definer./Harbinger of dark matter.” The list recalls Homer’s epithets, and, as such, the premise of a voyage. The dark matter at the center of Pierce’s journey is her sister’s death from cancer; the mathematical equations and constants that conjure meaning from the unfathomable become ways to figure her own grief.
In “The Stefan-Boltzmann Constant,” Pierce parses each element of the formula—its sigmas, pis, squares and cubes—to create a narrative of her sister’s illness (the equation measures the amount of heat emitted by a body that absorbs all radiant energy that hits it):
“h is the Planck constant or how far in life we got/until our first major trip to the hospital. Her knee surgery/at fifteen, her body on the stretcher in the living room at eighteen, me not yet.”
“NA is the Avogadro constant or her draw to the city/of Boston, how she named the CITGO sign her new North Star/and later: bandanas onher bald head under her Red Sox cap.”
“Notes on the Hubble Constant” (used to calculate the speed at which the universe expands) reflects the grief of immediate loss. Death equals “no ‘x’ in space, no pinpoint, prick, coordinate/location, sonar, Google maps, roving hands in the dark/can’t find it because it’s not there.” About her sister, Pierce writes, “when she was failing they had sex & there was a time that was the last time.” She laments, “the speed at which we are leaving each other is the same/as the Hubble constant/or the same as everything else in the universe.” Dying is our common lot, but Pierce’s elegy make this one particularly poignant as she struggles to frame it within the rational language of physics.
Pierce punctuates The Visible Planets with a series of sonnets she scatters like asteroids. Most of them depict pairs of lovers named for planets paired with their moons—Jupiter and Callisto, Neptune and Triton, Mars and Phobos. Their names root in myth—the nymph Callisto was raped by Jupiter; Triton was Neptune’s son, and Phobos—fear— Mars’ attendant. Some contemporary lovers shadow their ancient stories; others don’t. In “Jupiter & Callisto,” one (male) lover is a cosplayer and the other a pole dancer. “Pluto & Charon” evokes the river Styx in lines like “Pluto drifts/into the club. The mist skirts the street in waves.” The club’s a little bit like hell: “…Charon confesses/that singing is like getting pitched off a cliff./Pluto squirms…,suppresses/the thought watching feels like that too.” “Eris & Dysnomia” asks:”How do Discord and Lawlessness unwind?/ With Minor Threat’s Out of Step, dirty chai,/and Gone in Sixty Seconds. Eris swipes/ underneath the pillow, and a butterfly/blade skitters to the floor. She chides her wife:/We agreed. No weapons in bed, even knives.
Each sonnet plays with form—Shakespearian, Petrarchan, American, and other configurations of fourteen lines as various as amorous relationships. Part of the pleasure in each comes from observing how closely it hews to its classical, parallel universe. The titles suggest that lovers feel as powerful as gods, but the lines argue that even immortals can’t escape change.
Though a few of its poems work better as ideas than events of language, The Visible Planets succeeds in braiding the Two Cultures into one eloquent strand. Kudos to Game Over Books for introducing readers to a choir of new voices, including Aly Pierce’s.