Drift and Pulse (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)

In Drift and Pulse, her third book of poems, Kathleen Halme is fascinated with the domain where matter is experienced as mind. Drawing upon brain science, anthropology, and biology, these poems take aim at the big questions of form and death, how we “sublime and die.” The persistent “longing for shapes as elegant as instinct,” the rituals and fictions we invent to meet the needs of a ceaselessly revised universe animate the poems. Between “drift and pulse,” the capacity for transcendent experience is expressed as a hard-wired process of human brain architecture.