The Amateur Scientist's Notebook

Jesse DeLong's full-length debut, The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, is a collection of poems set among the mines and farmlands of Idaho. The severe landscapes move the speaker to investigate his romantic and familial relationships through lyric considerations of the natural world and scientific concepts. Like the seeds on the face of a sunflower, each poem is both whole and a piece of a whole. Mimicking this structure, or the "struggle of scale," these poems combine love and science, and the product is both declaration and interruption, elusive and graspable, love and the deconstruction of love. In The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, the friction between the stone and the mountain demonstrates the wonder generated in this struggle to become, to grow, and to change.