Axis Denied - Martin Elster

Axis Denied is a formally inventive collection of poems about the cosmos, science, technology, and the strange consequences of human longing in an immense universe. Martin Elster writes with a musician’s ear for rhythm and rhyme, moving from auroras, galaxies, Mercury’s sodium tail, and the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field to robots, alien cafés, black holes, starships, and speculative futures. These poems are playful, philosophical, comic, and haunting by turns. They ask how human beings find meaning on a “nanoscopic dot,” how science enlarges and unsettles the imagination, and how love, grief, absurdity, and wonder persist against the scale of space-time. In sonnets, villanelles, ballades, nonce forms, and other formal structures, Elster brings wit, musicality, and scientific curiosity to poems that range from celestial observation to science-fiction fable, from cosmic comedy to elegy for the Earth.