Description

In The Science of Things We Can Believe, landscapes that we might—from an innocent or ignorant distance—imagine as wholesome are violent even when our speaker, who demands to know “whose God would make it so,’’ renders them tender. In lyric poems reminiscent of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Christen Noel Kauffman builds an unfiltered myth of rural, religious landscapes in images and syntax that tumble one to the next, evolving seamlessly to convey the interconnectedness of all things, as this speaker knows—even the gutted animal is her, is “any meat we suck from a severed rib.” The farmhouse looks “more like a junkyard,” her father hands her a knife, animal flesh hangs from trees, and kids at Bible camp are asked to swallow goldfish to prove their faith. Always something here is just out of reach for this speaker starving for what she can’t quite name—the past, the present, some future—all “voices muffled on the other side” of a wall. These poems are her proclamation of self, her vow to grow forward with the urgency and tenacity of “trumpet vines that refuse to die.” 

—Lisa Fay Coutley, author of HOST and Small Girl 

In The Science of Things We Can Believe, the landscape opens like a book and nature evangelizes its own transformations. Religious symbolism aches open at each memory—the trees unbent by the weight of prayer, the boxed snakes emerging to test faith, a church burning on the side of a mountain. Childhood becomes a myth told and retold as the speaker drowns the wildness and baptizes the darkness. In Kauffman’s poems, everything radiates with meaning, with beauty, with a wild and terrifying hope.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal and Saudade

“After church we meet in the creek bed / with beer and banned books,” writes Christen Noel Kauffman in The Science of Things We Can Believe, her incredible collection, which delves into faith, farms, and folklore in such a fresh and wild way! I was completely captivated by this book. Kauffman writes, “we don’t mean to love the pigs before they’re slaughtered, /but once something’s named it becomes rooted through /the heart and we hold it in our cheeks like a lemon drop –” These kinds of lines remind me why I love poetry, because the speaker in these poems held my attention with stunning imagery and surprise, swirling with lyrical alchemy inside the nexus of danger and desire. I can’t wait to read everything from this wonderful and striking poet.

—Tiana Clark, author of I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood