Marvels of the Invisible

Book excerpt: Poetry. Winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press's First/Second Book Award, selected by Jeffrey Harrison. In this award-winning debut collection, the smallest things of the world bear enormous emotive weight. For Jenny Molberg, the invisible and barely visible are forms of memory, articulations of our place in the cosmos. Parsing the intersections between science and personal history, and contemplating archival letters from 17th- and 18th- century scientists along with new studies in biological phenomena, Molberg's poems examine complexities of relationships with parents and the faultiness of certainty about earthly permanence. In the title poem, a child begins by looking at an ant through a microscope, and later, as a husband and father, with the same discerning eye he recognizes the cancer in his wife's breast. MARVELS OF THE INVISIBLE sounds the depths of both grief and amazement, two kinds of awareness inseparably entwined.