All Motion She Believes engages with physics in the spirit of Niels Bohr's remark that "when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." This innovative poetry collection imagines the captions of physics textbook diagrams as written by Gertrude Stein, launches into conversation with natural philosophers Margaret Cavendish and Emilie du Châtelet, and features the work of contemporary physicist Shohini Ghose about quantum chaos and the words of string theorist Tasneem Zahra Husein about the possibility of other worlds. A glacier serves as a record of memory while a scientific translation by Sharon Yellowfly creates a fresh dialogue between gravitational wave physics and the traditional indigenous language of Blackfoot. Along the way, we encounter questions of whether Lucretius was mad, watch Newton wrestle with the infinitesimal, hear Heisenberg wonder whether atoms can be visualized, and much more.

Together, the poems and hybrids in All Motion She Believes confront enduring questions in natural philosophy about the cause of motion and the reality of atoms, as well as modern incarnations of those questions, asking how do we might visualize and interpret the remote objects and happenings of physics.

Reed's previous chapbooks include her ecopoetics work, Still Recognizable Forms, and World, Composed, a dialogue with the ancient poet Lucretius about atoms.

Coming soon

"Jessica Reed's All Motion She Believes does to physics what Susan Howe does to early American history. She makes it sing. This book is a palimpsest in which Reed writes through and with the words of physicists (and cognitive scientists) both ancient and modern (including Margaret Cavendish and Emilie du Châtelet). With a B.S. in physics, Reed is better placed to understand this material than most of us who are drawn to writing about it. To think about physics is always to question the nature of reality. 'Do you also assume,' Reed asks, 'that reality has edges?'—there are passages in this book that made me wish I'd written them." — Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer Prize Winner
Guggenheim Fellow
Recipient of National Book Critics Circle Award

"Deft, interrogative, self-aware, feminist, and exciting, All Motion She Believes atonce challenges the scientific model and the reader. Reed shows us how to push the edges of reality as far as we must into the imagination using both historical scientific accounts and her own experimental approach towards our accountability to the natural world, and ultimately, to ourselves." — Madhur Anand, Winner of the Governor General's Lit Award for Nonfiction. Author of two poetry collections.

"To read Jessica Reed's dazzling, richly allusive, structurally layered All Motion She Believes is to experience seeing through the 14,000 eyes of a fly. With her own microscopic vision, canny knowledge of physics, and linguistic precision, Reed ruminates on quarks, dresses, atoms, crystals, imagination, and other 'little particles' of our 'brittle world' while invoking the wisdoms and speculations of science and literary luminaries, including Cavendish, Voltaire, Bachelard, Newton, Tennyson, Heisenberg, Lucretius…. The 'whole mind' of this inventive collection 'orb[s]' from the cerebral to the earthly and back again. There are iridescent dragonflies, an 'owl shaking its head like a drunkard,' a dead goldfinch run over by the speaker's lawnmower. The female speaker in this hybrid collection claims: 'I can speak this way because I am under glass.' All Motion She Believes vibrates with 'lucid interspace' and (im)possibility—this poetry serves as both 'a scanning microscope and a pottery wheel,' a beautiful fusion of science and art." — Alessandra Lynch, Winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. Author of five poetry books incl. Wish Ave